this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Dunno who downvoted you because this is a valid question.
Now I'm just a hobbiest and my interest is more about the form money takes than the economics. That said I'll do my best to answer.
Imagine each community as a bucket, and the economic strength of that community as water in the bucket. As long as the water in the bucket is moving, it will stay fresh and healthy, but if it stops moving it becomes stagnate and unhealthy. Movement represents economic activity.
Taking water from one bucket to another increases water movement, which is good. However, taking too much water from a bucket to another bucket, without putting enough water back in from elsewhere, creates the risk of that one bucket will get too low on water. Not enough water and the water can't move, and it begins to stagnate. So, each bucket has an incentive to keep a certain amount of water in it. When we're not moving water between buckets, it's simply not a concern. But when we are, we have to be careful. Now, if all the buckets are small then it gets real easy to see when a bucket is getting low and to do something about it. However, as the buckets get bigger it gets harder and harder to judge if there's enough water and if it's moving enough. Smart people start saying things like "we should keep track of how much water we need, how much we giving to other buckets, and how much we receive from other buckets."
If water in our metaphor is economic strength, each drop of water has a certain about of economic value. This is where currency becomes helpful. If I come from City A and I have some shells that are acting as a storage if economic value, then I can trade those shells at City B for something of theirs with economic value, say, a cow hide. I've just taken "water" from "bucket" City B, but using the shells I've simultaneously given them "water" from "bucket" City A. This (assuming equal and fair) trade keeps the water level in any particular bucket from getting too low or too stagnant. It also makes it easier for people to monitor the water and take action to fix any problems.
So, a small secluded village practicing a gift economy all by itself has little to worry about. But whole nations practicing non-stop trade between each other risk the possibility of deficit trading, and they have an obligation to their people to keep their economy strong and moving. Money makes this A LOT easier.
That said, gift economy is still practiced today from time to time all around the world. You'll even encounter it in the poorer parts of America where people have the "neighbors help neighbors" attitude. It's just unfortunate and ironic that people in those places are usually the type to be all in on capitalism, and would get upset if you told them they weren't practicing capitalism amongst themselves. But that's an education issue.
I still don't see how this makes an economy based on mutual aid impossible at a large scale. Value is arbitrary anyways. For example, wood in somewhere like New England is easy to come by and therefore wouldnt have the same value that it would in somewhere like Nevada. Which is why I think trying tk track value is an inefficient way to track economics anyways. In a super simple way, mutual aid operates off of need. One community needs wood, so a community with an abundance of wood would give to the community that needs it. Mutual aid operates entirely off of need, as it is in overly simplistic terms charity that goes both ways. You give without expecting something in return and others do the same.
In other words, at a small scale a transaction using mutual aid is basically this. Person A needs salt to make a meal, Person B has salt to spare and so they share with Person A. Maybe at some point down the line Person B ends up needing something, and if Person A can provide they will, or maybe Person C will help. On a large scale you'd simply be replacing Person A with Community A, same with B and C. Trade shouldn't be about moving value, but about meeting needs. So I do not see why money is needed to facilitate that, as even currently we need to keep track of the specific resources that move, but also the value and money that moves with it. Mutual aid would remove the extra record keeping that comes with needing to also track value and money, as well as remove the unbalanced relationship tracking value brings.
By unbalanced relationship I mean that when value is what you are concerned about you don't care about meeting needs, you care about matching or profitting off of value. Rather than building your economy to meet peoples needs, you build to distribute something of the highest value and profit, which results in those that struggle financially being ignored. Look at tourist economies. Rather than producing a good, they produce a service, that service only really benefits people from away who have the money to spend on being a tourist. The people who live in these areas then struggle to find housing food, entertainment, etc because the communities money and resources are directed to what is profitable, like tourism.
I would like to also say thank you for not being agressive or rude, I am genuinely trying to understand your point of view and simply sharing mine so you can understand where I am coming from. Correct me if I am misunderstanding anything you said.
Edit: sorry I feel like I didn't address your points here well. With mutual aid I don't feel like the water bucket analogy works as it is about meeting need, not moving value. If a bucket stagnates then that means they are self reliant, but don't produce enough to help others. A sweet spot where they don't need to take anything in, but aren't doing well enough to help others. And in the case of making sure you aren't exporting more than you can handle (Holodomor moment), money doesn't make handling that easier. Money doesnt distinguish between wheat, wood, and cotton. It lumps the value of it all together. To prevent giving too much it would be simpler without money as you would just track the goods themselves, how much you need compared to how much you produce.
Let's establish a few things.
All forms of economics operate off of needs. Modern economists use the term "demand" but it's the same thing. You seem to be drawing a distinction between "need" as a necessity (high demand) versus "not need" as a luxury (low demand).
I assure you, the bucket analogy works exactly the same with mutual aide aka gift economies as it does with any other form of economics. The fact remains that a geographic area contains a finite amount of resources, representing the total potential economic strength of the region. Some of these resources are renewable, which can help keep that local economy strong, but if the system becomes over stressed by too much being taken out too quickly then that economy is going to be in trouble.
One thing I think you're missing is that a lot of the issues you're highlighting in our discussion aren't the result of a specific form of market activity, but failure of government to properly regulate their economy. Places that rely on tourism, for example, are poor because their governments are captured by capitalists (ie the people who provide the capital to build businesses) who then extract value from said community (taking water from the bucket) without putting enough back in. Governments could prevent that by using their regulatory powers to keep that money in their local economy through a variety of means, such as taxation, welfare programs, controlling what businesses they allow, creating incentives for locally own businesses or businesses of certain types, etc. That they don't do this is a failure of government, not of economics.
I also want to reiterate that the use of money isn't mutually exclusive to gift economies (or mutual aide as you seem to insist on calling it). Money is a facilitator of trade, a storage of value. Economies are the means by which value is moved and used. If you give me a sandwich today because I'm hungry, and I give you $5 tomorrow so you can buy a soda, we've both participated in gift economy market activity. I do this all the time with my friends; I refuse to keep track of who gives who what, because we all help each other as needed and I trust them to help me in return. At work, I sometimes bring snacks for everyone, and one of my coworkers sometimes gives me a $20 too help pay for those snacks. That's gift economy activity, but with money.
The money just makes things easier. So much so that non-money currency was invented several thousand years before money was invented. Even when people only practicing gift economy, they still found benefit in having a highly mobile, durable storage of value.
An issue though is governments will inevitably get corrupted, there is no way to ensure positions of power don't fall into the wrong hands. So to combat this, I feel the only decent solution is anarchist means of organization. The issue now is that because the economy is still controlled by money, there is inentive and thus risk of hoarding money which would create hierarchy and thus bring us back to systems of unconsentual government. And as I said, abolition of money would remove that. I ain't suggesting we just go ham with unregulated production and thus create scarcities, like you say. But the solution is to have people solve that themselves, not relying on money and government to regulate it. Kroptkin talks about much of this in Conquest of Bread. If you're interested, I would encourage a read, but I ain't gonna just say "read theory" and drop it cause I know that accomplishes nothing in reaching understandings. Its in the end, to me, an issue of money will always create inequality, and governments will always become corrupt. So what do you do?
Corruption happens because of consolidation of power. The abolition of money wouldn't prevent that, not even a little. Similarly, anarchy also doesn't prevent corruption, as anarchy doesn't prevent a consolidation of power.
The issue of hoarding money doesn't go away if we abolish money, either. Remember, money is nothing more than a storage of value. If there's no money, a person seeking power can hoard other things of value to create leverage and power over others. This hoarding of value, whether it's in the form of money or not, is what's detrimental to the economy.
And economies are not controlled by money, they're controlled by people as a group.
But you just suggested anarchy, so yes you are.
Yes yes, by forming committees to gather data, debate solutions, pick a solution, and then enforce their decision. Exactly.
That's government.
Again, because money is just a storage of value, things like inequality will be possible with our without it. Abolishing money wouldn't get rid of inequality.
You're giving me "money is the source of all evil" vibes because a lot of your arguments seem to be coming from ideology as opposed to an actual understanding of what money is. If I may, let me share something seemingly unrelated with you.
A reporter by the name of G.M. Gilbert sat through the Nuremberg trials, and wrote a book called the Nuremberg Diary in which he discusses his experience watching the most heinous Nazis attempt to justify their actions. After making such a study of human kind, he had this to say: “In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Money is an economic tool. It is a thing. It has no inherent power; without people to use it, money just sits still the same as a book or a shoe. As a tool, it enables certain behaviors, but it doesn't create them.
This conversation started as a mere discussion of how an economy would work, but you're taking it in the direction of right and wrong, good and evil. Well, those are human things that existed before money and will exist after money. Money is not the source of evil, and getting rid of it would do more harm to the average human than it would do good.
I'm not saying money is the source of evil, but it is a tool used by it. It heavily centralizes value making it easier to hoard. The other part of that being positions of power. Without money someone would have to hoard a valued resource like foods. What would allow someone to hoard enough food to affect others is authority. Anarchy tries to address both these issues. Some versions like Mutualism do keep money, and even anarcho-communists have used money through an anarchist market socialism to transition to a moneyless society. Anarchy does not mean no rules and no organization. It means consentual and horizontal organization. Rules that the community consent to, not forced upon them. And I think it is naive of you to think your position isn't idealogically influenced. We both want an ethical way to run an economy and there are ethical and unethical ways of doing that. The difference between us is what we view as an ethical and possible economic system. If you are interested in reaching an understanding of each others views I do not mind continuing this conversation. But if you are just trying to win a fight, I am not interested in continuing this.
My point about the presence of ideology in this discussion is that it started without ideology being a factor, that I was discussing economics the same way one might discuss physics out biology. You brought ideology into it, and I answered those points as best as I could given the blatant misunderstandings that I perceived regarding the economic aspects of your ideology. As an avowed socialist myself, I won't try to claim that I don't have views impacted by ideology but that doesn't mean ideology can't be set aside when discussing sciences like economics. Indeed, seeing ideology aside is imperative to understanding the real nature of the observable world, and these observations must inform one's ideology least one start saying things like "2+2=5". Which is precisely what I feel you've been doing. You're rejecting explanations of how economies work because it doesn't fit your ideological views. That is folly.
Given that your original question has been answered repeatedly, and you've rejected those answers, I can only conclude that the questions were asked in bad faith. I don't think further conversation will be productive. The only "fight" to be "won" is one that you started, and I'm tired of playing chess with pigeons. If you feel that means you "won" the discussion, then more power to you. Feel free to hit me up again when you want to actually understand things as they are, instead of how you think they ought to be.
I was never disagreeing with you out of ideological difference. I simply disagreed with the logic. Granted this discussion is over text and there are a lot of different ways for both of us to misunderstand the other. I did not go into this trying to win a fight, and never intended it to go in that direction. I feel it is best to end it with "agree to disagree" as I feel one or both of us is misunderstanding each other because of the communication barrier that comes with text.