this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
566 points (99.8% liked)
Memes of Production
1493 readers
1307 users here now
Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
UBI keeps capitalism and thus inequality. It’s a zero sum game where people’s wealth will flow towards the rich, enabling them in future to amass power to undo UBI and repeat the mistakes we have now.
Better solution is to ditch currency and focus on meeting people’s wellbeing needs directly.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Order of operations matters.
There's always a better perfect solution. If you're not willing to work for something achievable because your special vision for how things should be is the only thing you care about, well, that's why leftists fight each other instead of fighting the fascists that have taken over the usa and are in the process of taking over the rest of the world.
You have 1,000 slaves. Do you accept freeing 500 instead of fighting for all to be free?
Fight for what’s right, fuck compromise that perpetuates suffering. That’s what centrists do.
You refused to compromise, and now you have 1000 slaves. But at least you can tell yourself you did the right thing, as the slaves, slave on.
Because refusal to compromise = never succeeding?
You’d be in favour having some slave states and some non-slave states instead of fighting a civil war to end slavery.
No, I'd compromise to buy time, until I can stab the confederates in the back, duh.
Accepting freeing 500 doesn't mean stopping the fight to free the other 500.
Should the Union during the US Civil War have refused to free any slaves until it could guarantee all slaves would be free?
Do the thing that helps now and work to do the things that help in the future as well. Why would I allow 500 slaves to remain in servitude just because I can't free all 1,000 right now?
Does freeing 500 take 1% of the effort of freeing all 1k? Do the 500 first and then start working towards freeing the rest.
Now, this requires actually doing the second part, but some good actually done is better than all the good wished for but none done.
People get complacent after doing some, it’s always better to do it all than half arse it and promise to come back later.
Plus it y’know actually stops the suffering rather than prolonging it but lesser.
To some degree, this is correct - people tend to leave behind the passion once they've done something about it. But this is a reason to do as much as one can with the circumstances given, regardless of worrying whether it is 'too radical' to last; not a reason to refuse to do anything that doesn't immediately result in the end-goal of your ideology.
Put another way, this argument could be used to oppose anarchist organizing - after people do a little for the revolution, like organizing, they tend to get complacent. Only immediate and violent action in service to revolution is moral.
But it doesn't stop the suffering until it succeeds, if it succeeds.
Which is the better outcome? Someone wanting to save 10,000 lives, but failing to save anyone's life; or someone who wants to save 1,000 lives, thinking it's all they can do (rightly or wrongly), and succeeds in saving 500?
You can’t ditch currency. Currency isn’t some grand invention of the state. It’s the direct result of beings valuing things at different amounts at different times. Technically current is using any stand in to ease the trade barrier but colloquially some people use love as a currency. Many kinds of social animals trade and what they trade could be deemed currency.
You can absolutely do away with currency if the current mode of production got abolished. Currency itself is a necessity in a society that produces commodities for exchange, which creates rise for social constructs such as value, value forms like money, the possibility for an innate crisis and so on.
The first 2 chapters of Capital explains this, the commodity production system was a historical development rather than something coming out of nature (no chemist was able to find value through microscope), and we can certainly produce things to satisfy needs rather than exchange, with a much lower amount of work hours needed to do so.
You can 100% ditch currency, you don’t not need a trade or barter based system. Humans have been operating on a gift economy model for hundreds of thousands of years, currency and trading is a blip in our history.
People are capable of supporting each other without profit incentives.
Great, now please scale this up to all of human civilisation and society with all of its mind-bogglingly complex logistics and infrastructure, ever changing needs, countless adversarials and requirements for advanced science.
Its a nice idea but doesnt feel very applicable unless the entire human race just kinda has a change of heart.
Okay, there is literally nothing about it that can’t be scaled up except for capitalism being the predominant system backed by violence.
So let's say I really want to investigate superconducting magnets, because I really like that field and want to do research. I need processed rare earth products that only exist on the other side of the globe.
In your gift economy, how would I proceed to acquire those?
I suspect these policies often assume that either we live in startrek or we’re back to the woods and have no need for superconducting magnets :-/
surely no other people have any benefit or incentive to find those superconductors and so no one would be willing to aid you in your research, including people who could get those minerals, right?
Is being flippant part of the economic model or an extra? Doesn't get me closer to those hard to extract materials that are in very short supply.
You shouldn't state this as fact. It's not, archaeologists have been arguing between the formalist and substantavist theories of economic models for decades now. You seem to be favoring the formalist view, but there is a strong arguement to be made that market principles such as supply and demand existed deeper in the past as well.
While there may not have been currency, the historic economics of humanity were certainly greater than a gift economy model.
I'm confident that if you waved a magic wand and removed currency, an hour later it would be reinvented via "hey, will you do me this favor? I'll owe you one" -> "You already owe me one. But I guess you'll owe me two? Let me write this down"
Yup. Gets even easier once all the emancipatory technology innovations cease being classified, suppressed and secreted to maintain the corporate monopolisation rigged game of kleptarchy. When that stops, obsoleting currency/money becomes a greater viable potential, if not just removes some areas from profiteering. Such things are not cosmic fundamentals. Greedy eyes are on water, air, sunlight.
I imagine quality would improve and enshitification would cease, without corrupt fiat currency driving churn. And [as we currently are, it's an] accelerating churn at that, in a desperate race to the bottom. Unsustainable. Essential vital necessity to move beyond it.
UBI may be a stepping stone, perhaps a step away from reducing currency/money to mere resource accounting, on to greater things yet. But yes, not if left in the hands of the current oligarchs, nor in any such system that so readily gives oligarchs absolute power.
Sublimation out of their rigged game trap may come fast [, or not at all, only piecemeal placatium fakery].
No. Currency is convenience and convenience wins 99% of the time.
Yeah I’ll pass thanks, currency and capitalism is killing the planet and us along with it.
Nothing easier than being dead tho I guess.
Can you explain your non- currency economy for those of us without that much imagination?
Does trade still exist?
If so what is the medium of exchange?
How is value evaluated?
Unfortunately it seems that proponents of these systems fail to deliver when we get to practical issues - I'm open-minded enough to consider the thought, but I too have a bunch of questions that seem will go unaddressed.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again. If one (or a group) of these anarchists is willing to do an AMA, I think it'd be very enlightening for a lot of us. I for one am curious to learn how lots of things are supposed to work under their proposed system. But whenever I find an anarchist in the wild, it doesn't feel like an appropriate time/place to ask such questions.
There are some big issues that are difficult to address, but if someone truly believes anarchy is the ideal system, providing information to help others understand how it's all supposed to work can go a long way. A dedicated AMA can clear up questions, and who knows, maybe even win some people over to their side.
From this side of life, seems true. Can't say the dead agree, but they're not complaining much.
Bring on the convenience of the emancipation by technology, provisioning each and all free energy and energy-to-matter transfer, effectively "star trek replicators".
Star Trek however needed most governments to collapse as a result of WW3 and Vulcans showing up to help rebuild afterwards.
We got WW3 almost covered, just not that sure about those Vulcans ...
Oh, and there is nothing zero sum about it. That’s kind of the point of a good teade
That’s exactly zero sum, one person gains from one persons losses. I pay/you profit, loss/win.
That’s how currency works unless you’re suggesting we just print money off any time we need to make a purchase.
Zero sum presumes that there is no net gain or net loss, but trade results in both.
A 'good' trade, the kind that economists tout as a benefit, results in both parties gaining, because both parties receive objects they value more than the objects traded away, especially within contexts like comparative advantage.
A 'bad' trade, the kind that many leftists observe and are aware of, results in one party gaining at the other's disproportionate expense - such as capitalists damaging actual economic activity by extracting all the value they can extort from their workers.
A zero-sum trade is theoretically possible, but generally not the case even with the extreme abstraction of currency.
I can make good shoes. I make bad pastries.
You make good pastries. You make bad shoes.
I make you shoes. You make me pastries. Now I have good shoes and pastries. You also have good shoes and pastries. Everyone wins.
That’s bartering not currency.
An even better system is, you can make shoes so you make people shoes. I can make pastries so I make people pastries. There’s no requirement to exchange, we can just make stuff for people and they can likewise do the same.
That’s a gift economy, people cooperating together for the benefit of everyone.
Here's a hypothetical:
I'm in a feud with the person who runs the pasture land. He won't kill his cattle/sheep if it's to provide leather for my shoes. Everyone else likes him and his milk and they tell me to bury the hatchet.
But he insists on ever thicker and higher quality boots because the pasture he "works" is so overgrown and muddy from poor maintenence. This cuts into my ability to supply quality shoes for everyone else so I can't do it.
Of course, I stutter and don't do well with public speaking but he has a silver tongue. I can't even lay out half the facts before he's convinced the town that I'm a lazy parasite and a bad shoemaker; I'm exiled. I will now die starving and alone. The town will waste time and energy wearing through low quality woven shoes, content with the thought that they're not wasting milk cows on that shitty cobbler.
If there was a market/bartering economy:
That sounds really lovely, but for some of us, we wouldn't even be able to get our families to participate. Consider the families that make their adult kids pay rent, even though they own the house the live in. I'd think that doing things like laundry, cleaning, cooking, picking up prescriptions, groceries, etc. should suffice for contributing to the household. Thankfully, that's how it worked when I was an adult living with my parents - I didn't pay rent, but I was often a "gopher" that was sent out to do errands on behalf of my mom. It was annoying, but I figured that by doing such things I was supporting my family just as they were supporting me, and there was an unspoken agreement about it.
Unfortunately, not all families/households operate like that, at least here in the highly-individualized US. If some parents won't extend a gift economy within their own families, it'd be an uphill battle to get them to apply it toward people they aren't related to.
Currency is an abstraction for all the goods and services you might barter. I can sell you a pair of shoes for 1 currency unit, then buy your pastries for 1 currency unit. The result is the same.
The mechanism of markets is that the price of goods follows the law of supply and demand. Prices are a universal signal to producers that they should produce more/less of a good.
Without currency you need a mechanism to replace this. Given your previous posts in favour of anarchism, I’m guessing you don’t favour central planning. So what mechanism for determining how much and of what kinds of goods should be produced, do you prefer?
Given I’m an anarchist, I value a gift economy where we stop assigning value to goods and focus on providing for wellbeing.
How much a person should have is as much as they need.
But that's not what a gift economy inherently results in.
Yes it is.
Unless you have something concrete to prove all societies (even the current ones still existing) that engage in such practices inevitably must change away from such a system, that isn’t just a “this happened a few times historically so it must always be true even though there are still gift economies operating today” I don’t want to hear it.
I interpreted your statement as "I value a gift economy, which is where we stop assigning value to goods and focus on providing for wellbeing", since it was contrasted with economies of exchange, rather than "I value a gift economy of the kind where we will stop assigning value to goods and focus on providing for wellbeing."
Sorry, you know I'm pedantic and tend to interpret things a bit narrowly in that light. Since the former is not what you meant, I do apologize for the interruption.
I didn't mean to say that a gift economy can't be what you want it to be, or that it can't sustain itself in that position of altruism. I just am always wary of treating alternate systems as innate cure-alls. Like liberals who think that democracy is the cure for social ills, instead of just one component of the cure. A gift economy is a legitimate and arguably important proposal, just like democracy is, just not inherently exclusive of the issues that it is sometimes proposed to fix.
EDIT: Put another way, it would be like someone said "I value democracy where we will stop embracing hierarchy and focus on equal power redistribution." Valuing a democracy in which that happens is laudable, but there are definitely people who think "The more democratic the system, the more egalitarian it becomes", which any number of democratic systems will show... that democracy alone is insufficient for egalitarianism. I interpreted your statement more like the latter and less like the former. Again, I apologize.
But how does that work in terms of manufacturing in a global economy? Or are you calling for a return to villages with cottage industries?
I’m calling for an extreme reduction in global manufacturing, because what we do is excessive due to capitalism. But that’s unrelated to general anarchism and follows other branches.
And it works by people organising and planning together for their mutual benefit instead of accumulation of currency.
You do understand that people can coordinate and cooperate internationally out of their choosing right? We don’t need a person up top to tell us what to do and what to send where.