Moneyless Society: The Next Economic Evolution

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In 1941 he publishes his first story about robots and his great idea and insight is that the robots are not going to be our enemies or our doom as a society, the way robots were usually portrayed, as Frankensteins. The robots will liberate us, and so Asimov is trying to figure out a world where human labor is no longer necessary for survival. And that is something you see throughout Star Trek, much more so in The Next Generation than in the original series. In The Next Generation you have these incredible machines that will make anything for you on the spot and on demand—the replicators—and in a way the replicator is a metaphor for universal automation the way it is described in Asimov’s robot stories.”

Of course this criticism is still rather philosophical—capitalism (a term which Marx doesn’t even use) is identified with individualism, “a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another” (p.173). Marx argues that in such a world it is money that emerges as the god to which everything else is subordinated and which completely dominates people’s lives. Depending on how you pay, this record may be more or less extensive and may be visible to a few or several organisations. It may comprise information that shows who you are, where you were, how much you spent, what you bought and from whom. Your smartphone might reveal just as much information, if not more, but it’s still possible to leave your device at home, or even go without one. The equivalent choice won’t be available if cash goes.The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside and above man. Owing to this alien mediator—instead of man himself being the mediator for man—man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original relationship is inevitable” (p.212).

Living without money is not easy. You have to really care and also give up some things. You will give up the comfort to buy what you desire. Instead you'll get another lifestyle: one in which you'll be happy with what you have. One in which you are obligated to be more creative to satisfy your needs. The crime levels in this world would be much lower since most crimes are committed out of greed and the need to make money for a living; Altruistic society: as proposed by Mark Boyle, a moneyless economy is a model "on the basis of materials and services being shared unconditionally" that is, without explicit or formal exchange. [31] The eternal problem of communism is that " from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" doesn't work unless: There is a caveat. If we suddenly remove money from today's world and ask people to work without being paid, there will be a lot of people who will refuse to work, at least, initially. The number of those people will be most likely higher in cultures that assign high value to money and tend to see money as an indicator of personal success and fulfilment. I am talking here about cultural views and stereotypes, in other words, the perceived role of money in human lives. Whether this view is correct or not is a different topic.Earlier in these same notes on Mill Marx had explained in more detail how human beings came to be dominated by the products of their own labour, while at the same time giving us a glimpse of how things would be different in a moneyless society: