this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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Memes of Production
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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].