@KevinCarson1 @neonsnake @C4SS
I just had a sudden memory of sitting in high school economics class thinking, "this...this just seems like a big scam..."
Took years to unlearn thinking I wasn't smart enough to understand economics.
@CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @neonsnake @C4SS
Not just a scam. Death cult.
@violetmadder @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS
I have vague memories of being a teen and my Dad* "explaining" to me that banks lend to their customers from the savings of other customers, and also invest savings into other companies.
I'll be totally honest, I still think I'm not smart enough to understand "that" side of economics. Like, everytime I feel I've got a handle on MMT, I read something that makes me completely doubt my understanding of it. I have an acquaintance who is *very* high up in one of the banks in the UK who has told me that no, banks don't create money out of nothing, and that everything has to balance every single day at 4.15pm.
I "believe" him, but I couldn't follow his arguments at all, and there's a chance that in fact they do create money out of nothing, but his way of thinking (liabilities vs assets or something) was at odds with my own - very limited - understanding.
I further believe that this is, in part, deliberate. I've got a vague thought that the whole thing is confusing to us mere lay-people, to keep us from just...going off and ignoring it altogether and doing our own thing.
(In a very, very, very small way, I'm involved with some LETs in my local area - which is literally just a spreadsheet we use to keep track of who owes who what lol)
*My Dad was a Certified Accountant; eventually at CFO level, which might make it even worse 😬
@neonsnake @CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @C4SS
From what I understand, ONLY central banks get to create money from thin air. They are the specially anointed ones who get to pass it out. Used to be physically made, now it can be just a keystroke so it's all even further divorced from reality.
And yes the more arcane and esoteric the whole thing is, the more special the power of its initiated clerics becomes.
@simon_brooke @KevinCarson1 @neonsnake @CorvidCrone @C4SS
"When one person lacks food and another has surplus, the one who lacks food must trade today or go hungry; the one who has surplus can afford to wait for higher prices. Consequently, markets always systematically benefit the rich"
Oho. THAT is a very tidy point that I hadn't seen in such a nutshell before.
@violetmadder @simon_brooke @KevinCarson1 @CorvidCrone @C4SS
Yes and no.
I started this thread for a particular reason, so I feel I have the right to step in.
The people in Gaza - and I absolutely do NOT want to minimise their suffering here - are not suffering because they are existing under the free market conditions that was in my head when I spoke, but instead are under the yoke of an irredeemably evil State in the form of Israel.
Again, *please* don't take this as minimising their extremely real suffering, but it's only tangentially related to my initial post.
@KevinCarson1 @violetmadder @CorvidCrone @C4SS
This is the bit where I get baffled.
I fully understand that at points in history, "money" has been backed by gold, silver, whatever. Ok, fine.
What I never understood is the people who thought that this was a *good thing*.
Making "money" scarce always baffled me as a concept, particularly when posited by people who...don't actually own any gold etc.
@Steve @KevinCarson1 @violetmadder @CorvidCrone @C4SS
" But, I doubt you'd convince people the general population that one hour of labor is equivalent across professions."
Doesn't need to be.
How familiar are with the Labour Theory Of Value?
@neonsnake @KevinCarson1 @violetmadder @CorvidCrone @C4SS Well, I read all about it in Kevin's book, Mutualist Political Economy. It makes sense to me, but I also know that an awful lot of people are dismissive of it.
I guess what I'm thinking about is how, in a post-capitalist economy, the way we allocate value to each other would change in ways that are hard to imagine today. If people didn't have to worry about dying of starvation or exposure, they'd be a lot more generous towards each other. That's when we'd be able to relax enough to start treating money as just an accounting system.
I've knocked everyone else off this thread for now, except you and Kevin.
(Mainly because he knows very well that his "The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand" was formative for me, and probably saved me from turning into a miserable AnCap lol)
I believe that in a post-capitalist world, our relationships will be very different.
My stance right now is that -absent state intervention - we would, most likely, guarantee a basic standard of living to all. I think we'd just do it, without needing any compulsion. I base this on my experience during the early days of Covid.
I think that as we got "further" away from each other - not necessarily geographically - that trade would come into play, and we'd start checking whether obligations are being met; within that, I think we'd be checking in on "why" obligations are not being met.
I read a book some years ago by Becky Chamber whereby they have a "trade" system, but also it's incumbent upon them to say "oh, crap! Dave hasn't put anything in for the last month! Do...do we think he's okay?" and it would trigger a "Let's make sure Dave is ok"
This is a world in which I want to live, and I try my best right now to live in. I *do* have a spreadsheet of "obligations", and I also have a set of "ah, do we think Dave's okay? He's been super quiet, folks" notes as well.
@neonsnake @KevinCarson1 I think you're right about all this, and as such, it follows that the State stands in the way of people connecting directly to support each other.
I have a hard time picturing how we get from here to there, but then I remember it doesn't have to all happen at once. We can take certain steps right now, like using FLOSS, and solve problems like universal communal housing and cooperative pharmaceutical research down the road.
I think it takes all of us.
Like, I "know" what FLOSS is, but I'm not yer guy for that. I'm super ignorant about it.
I want someone who can show me that, and also someone who show me (or just do for me!) darning and mending my clothes.
Me? I can cook *really well* and I can guide you on how to do so.
I'm also pretty handy with cars and with DIY.
We need *all sorts* - all of them!
Gimme that. Gimme "you" that knows how to get me off of bloody Google, give me someone who can darn my socks, give me someone who can... (and so on and so on).
Give me the broad spectrum of skills. That's what I'm trying to build.
@neonsnake @KevinCarson1 It might have been more precise to say that we can start wherever we are. As someone once said in a very different context, we can't do everything at once, but we can do something at once.
On the topic of FLOSS, don't worry about changing your software. Save your word-processing documents in the ODT file format, not DOCX, and you're most of the way there. Seriously.
@Steve @neonsnake @KevinCarson1 @CorvidCrone @C4SS
Art in particular requires an economy where generosity is possible. People need to be able to reward art by FREELY expressing their appreciation. When competition makes every transaction inherently adverserial, where everybody is accustomed to paying the least they can get away with and forgets about fairness, that torpedoes the whole thing. Scarcity and insecurity breed hostility. When artists are struggling, doubling down on copyright and FORCING people to pay for things at gunpoint just makes things worse. Hardly anybody can imagine what it would be like to just give each other nice things because it's cool.
A world with open source stuff, cooperation and so on-- anything nice, basically-- has to start with people getting their basic needs met so they can stop clawing at each other.
Right wingers love that lifeboat analogy, where they can justify tossing people overboard if they can't fish or whatever.
That's a fundamental difference in paradigm. Avarice vs generosity, cruelty vs care, oppression or freedom.
@KevinCarson1 @violetmadder @Steve @CorvidCrone @C4SS
I'm a little less convinced about the housing situation (micro-villages etc), but that's very possibly because I've spend *most* of my life in English suburbia, so I'm very used to rows and rows of 3 bedroom semi-detached houses, and have difficulty imagining other scenarios.
On the other hand, that still lends itself to the sort of arrangements that, say, Colin Ward envisioned. Or (and I've totally blanked on the artist) there were a set of inspiring illustrations from, I think, the 70s of what a self-sufficient terrace or village might look like - communal vegetable gardens, solar, buildings given over to workshops/kitchens and the like, playgrounds and parks.
Despite probably looking like I'm defending markets to the hilt, I too actually would like to see more stuff move away from a "cash" nexus. At the moment, much of what we call "reproductive labour" is carried out without involving markets - including things outside your own family, like baby-sitting your neighbours' kids for a few hours, or feeding their dogs/cats whilst they're away, or whatever, and we don't really give it a second thought (I very much appreciate that "reproductive labour" has it's own issues by being unpaid)
I'd like to see "feeding people", for instance, move into that "outside the cash nexus" space - but in order to do so, a massive sea-change needs to happen in terms of giving people access to (again, for instance) the space/technology/knowledge to grow their own food.
It's doable now, to a greater extent than many people think, but - at the moment - it will involve a level of "markets", as most people *have* to have access to currency; most people have bills that can only be settled with currency, and at the lowest level I can think of, taxes on property which are unavoidable.
I think that moving away from the cash nexus as much as possible - and using other forms of tracking obligations within our communities - so as to leave as much cash in people's hands to pay those ever-increasing bills, is a good start, and is something actually material that we "can do next Tuesday", as it were.
@neonsnake @KevinCarson1 @violetmadder @C4SS
"What I never understood is the people who thought that this was a *good thing*."
Propaganda. Education for the purpose of sustaining the status quo reinforces this idea.
People who support gold or silver backed currency are afraid of inflation making currency worthless. I don't think their reasoning is correct, but it's the reasoning that must be dealt with for them to overcome this belief.
Kevin Carson
Corvid Crone
Violet Madder
NeonSnake
Simon Brooke
Cy
Stephen Dioxide 