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MrSamsonite t1_j21x59s wrote

Reply to comment by viper5delta in Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology by AutoModerator

Good question!

First off, there never was a barter system in any significant way (ie, "I've got one goat and you've got some clogs and we exchange them"). Rather, the assumption that there always must have been a sort of market exchange of goods is modern society projecting its own beliefs onto the past.

In the example above, most tribal societies wouldn't see it as you owning a goat and me owning some clogs. Instead, they would like see us as having (or having access to) a goat and some clogs. If the tribe had things available to it, members of the tribe wouldn't be excluded from them. Concepts like private property, individual ownership and the pursuit of maximizing individual wealth as we know them today are much, much more recent.

One thing to note about most ideas of Anarchist society is that it's very communal (which may seem counterintuitive to people who think anarchy = chaos). The idea is that people work for the benefit of all (which includes themselves) rather than for themselves (which may exclude others).

You're right that such a system would likely gain some efficiency by quantifying labor or goods and services, but that doesn't require money. The key tenet of money that you're missing is that some individual or group owns that abstraction of value (and others do not own it). In a well-functioning anarchist society, the idea is that you wouldn't pay for food or housing or healthcare, for example; rather, these things would be available to you because the members of the society work to provide them to all according to their need.

Obviously there are lots of complexities and uncertainties that such a society would need to navigate, but the main thrust is that if we abolish private property, there is no longer a role for money to play.

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viper5delta t1_j228qz8 wrote

> Obviously there are lots of complexities and uncertainties that such a society would need to navigate, but the main thrust is that if we abolish private property, there is no longer a role for money to play.

I'm still having a bit of trouble with this, and rather than trying to put it into words, I think an example would be more useful.

Say you have Bob. Bob wants a cake for a celebration. He could make it himself, but he's not that great at it and it might not turn out so hot. However, he knows Dave bakes great cakes, the best you can get in the local area. Now they're not exactly friends, so Dave probably won't take the time to bake the cake just because Bob asks (if it was life or death, that's another matter, but ultimately it's just a cake). But! Bob is a great artist, and he knows Dave wants a painting of his family. An offer is made and agreed to, Bob gets a cake, and Dave gets a painting.

Now, this type of exchange seems like one where just having some money as an abstraction of labor that could be stored and transferred at will would be useful, rather than having to perform all labor as it comes.

So I guess, how would this transaction go down in an Anarchist society? Would this type of transaction take place in an Anarchist society? Does Bob ever get good cake and does Dave ever get a nice painting? Is it just assumed that, in an anarchist society, every Bob and Dave are good enough friends to do this type of non-critical "luxury" labor just as part of the friendship? Are the communities just small enough so that Bob's celebrations are Dave's celebrations and vice versa?

Also, any recommended reading/places where I could badger with lots of questions, because my mental wheels keep spinning off into unknown unknowns as I try to figure out what such a society would look like and how/if it would be able to supply services like modern medicine, or the internet, or widescale publication of literature, etc etc etc

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