a world without money

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

what would the world be like if there were no such thing as money?

what if the technologies we began re-inventing did not depend on depleting fossil fuel reserves or using kinetic energy to generate electricity?

fresh water can be distilled from salt water, and as long as the oceans of the planet do not dry up, there will be water.

Marx's treatise on "the fetishism of commodities" is comparable to Jean Paul Sartre's commentary on Edmund Husserl's ideas of the "epoché" - a form of "fascination" (in the term's original sense, as the "evil eye" or a "fixation" of the gaze) upon an object that reduces it from its apparent "being for others" (comprised of its subjective value labels) to a pure condition of "being in itself" (denuded of all relationships to other objects, simply a substance without ANY implied meaning).

Marx's error, aside from ignoring the concept of "self-ownership" - that one's personal body is their "personal property" in the form of a "commodity" sustained by their own labor using it as a resource - lies in his assumption that the "use-value" of a commodity is a subjective value, while "labor power" (the amount of time spent making a thing) is an objective value. Although how much time was spent making a thing IS an objective format for measurement, it is one that is too easily manipulable to induce value in wasted time. One can pluck a stick from the woods, meditate on it for a week, turn around and sell it as a "magic wand" at the rate of one week's worth of their "labor," but it will still be just a wooden stick. This is why "use value" and not "labor power" (measured by time as Marx proposes) is the properly considered "more objective" method of measuring value. While "anyone may take the resources available and put them to a different use," nonetheless the ONLY "use" that should be "valued" is that which benefits the greatest number of people, including the "commodity's" producer themselves. Thus, rather than generating "fiat" value from "labor power" measured in man-hours, the better weight for objective measurement of a commodity's value is its usefulness to the majority.

some argue capitalism gives us in the form of competitive productivity, justly rewarded, a pacifistic proxy for the violence and bloodshed and murdering of war.

is an alternative world to the one we live in now so difficult or distasteful to imagine that it is not possible to break from analysis of the prevalent historical trends in western civilization for even a moment? Can we return to being a "cashless society" - as we had been when we were cave-dwellers - and still keep the technological benefits the use of money has, in the meantime, obtained for us? What would the world be like now if money had never been invented at all?

I can imagine a world without money. But to acquire such a world, we would have to reject our innate urge to wage war. If we could "manifest" matter mentally, then we would not need money to acquire goods anymore. But to be able to survive the attainment of "manifestation," we would first have to acquire the prerequisite preference for peace over war, because if we remained savage, and attained manifestation, we would quickly destroy the entire cosmos.

money being convenient doesn't disprove the premise of a "cashless" society being possible. While money MAY be (arguably) a fair and balanced way to measure value, it is also going to ALWAYS be unequally distributed among the population, and ultimately (particularly in fiat-currencies) it will wind up consolidated in the hands of people who think inbreeding with one another is a good idea. Then you wind up with people in power like we have today. Is this an "ultimate" good? Or is this only an intermediate step on the road to, hopefully, something better?

I'm not advocating barter either. There are more than only the two options of either "capitalism" or "barter."

so far everyone with whom I've discussed this topic has been in consensus that, even without money as a method of token trade, resources will never be unlimited, and this fact of materiality means violence is inevitable as a means for mortal life-forms to acquire and guard the necessary requisites for their own survival. Generally speaking, my proposal of "mental manifestation of matter from the ether" as an alternative to acquiring resources through capital, effort or violence has been met with skepticism as to whether humanity, as a whole, is capable of surviving a transition to such a concept; the premise appears to be "ahead of its time" at the best. Is such a goal more worth working toward than the sky-scrapers of modern capitalism? And if people now are too focused on short-term jobs and survival, can they be led to such an outcome regardless through a series of short-term jobs, a series of small tasks effected independently resulting in a product beneficial to them all, alike a puzzle being solved by many different groups simultaneously? If they can, would this be a beneficial course to lead humanity upon?