Mastodawn

@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.

Show thread

Violet Madder Mar 17

@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.

Show thread

Kevin Carson

@violetmadder @Steve @neonsnake @CorvidCrone @C4SS All markets do is provide a mechanism for establishing market-clearing prices, in regard to those goods and services that are exchanged via price. They are secondary to property rules, and to the social and institutional structures in which production takes place. And markets do not determine which production takes place in the cash nexus and which takes place outside it. All those social-institutional structures are prior to markets, and markets only function in cases where those structures rely on them. My guess is that, in a postcapitalist and post-state society, most people would be born into primary social units like micro-villages, multi-family cohousing projects, etc. And a very large share of production (most fruits and vegetables, manufactured goods that could be produced in a microvillage's micro-manufacturing shops, etc.) would be produced within such units rather than exchanged via the cash nexus. Markets would involve the surpluses exchanged between such units, particular goods that such units specialized in producing for sale to other units, producer goods that require production on a larger scale than such units, and minerals and raw materials auctioned off by commons-management bodies democratically accountable to the primary social units in a given geographical area. The typical work week for producing enough to live comfortably would be well under 20 hours, and the non-cash nexus internal economies of such social units -- which contain enough people for pooling risks, costs, and productive effort -- would be the primary locus for mutual aid and support for the production of art.