this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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I don't think I'm getting the "money if fake" one. Money is just an IOU that we've all agreed on the value of to simplify bartering.
I never agreed to it, and the way it's dispersed only benefits the people that already have too much of it from exploiting other people's labor.
You can disagree with giraffes too, to the same effect.
You're going to hate something because of the way governments distribute the thing it represents? How is that not like hating all water because you had a flood? Hating air because it's too windy?
You think social constructs are akin to animals and biological imperatives?
By that strange logic, humans, Manifest Destiny (aka the kill all the natives cause we're white and want their shit social construct of colonizing Americans), and thirst are all comparable concepts.
I hate to tell you, but almost every economy that has ever existed has at some point collapsed, just as ours will one day. We can always kill all the giraffes, and we're sure as shit the type, but I promise you, being thirsty will exist long after our currency and nation are nothing but a dull history lesson or forgotten all together.
The owners of this system would have you believe it's invulnerable, absolute, and forever, just like the Roman Emperors of old did.
OK, let's say I agree with your reasoning. Do we go back to the barter system?
The barter economy is a myth, based on absolutely nothing other than a guy just deciding he was right with no evidence. Indigenous peoples had all sorts of complex, non market, moneyless economies. One of them is known as a gift economy, where there is competition between communities and individuals to give gifts larger than the gift they received before. A modern moneyless economic concept is a library economy: think of libraries, but for everything non-consumable.
Produce excess; give it away for bragging rights
What a glorious world it could be, instead of this colossal fucking piece of shit
Honestly currency is fine, but not bastardized by the real villain: capital markets. It has made our currency representative of backwards, antisocial values, and in great quantities, proof of how good one is at extracting value from their fellow humans.
Capital markets have gone from supposedly a means for seed funding for businesses to the final word, despite contributing NO LABOR to the products or services they take almost all the produced profit from. And in our terminal state market capitalism, they're eating one another and playing economic tricks for short term cash grabs they enforce on companies through threats of lawsuit, breaking entire economic sector's ability to make the products/services they literally existed to provide in the process. LABOR makes the world run, grows the food, makes the discoveries, capital investment just takes all the fruits and leaves a few crumbs.
We're going to collapse, but if we cared, we'd remake our economy that rewards cooperatives and punishes corporations, and capital investment would receive a small fraction of what labor produces instead of the opposite as it is today.
And yes, going back to a barter system would be better than this. We might even still be able to breathe above ground in 50 years.
I know this is going to be necessary, but I'm selfish enough to hope it happens after I get old and die. I really don't want to have to live through the violent revolution it will take for that to actually get done.
A least you're more honest than the relatively small class of benefactors of this corrupted economy who don't even acknowledge that, being supported by skilled laborers at every level of profit and life, but truly self-deluding themselves and others into believing they earned and should have society/politics/media warping levels of wealth. Reward good ideas and harder work yes, but within reason.
Are we a civilization or not? I want us to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-gdHrINyMU
Sounds like you are exactly getting the "money is fake" one
Right but what point is it trying to make by pointing it out?
Yes, money is a social construct, but it's a construct that represents something real, i.e. trade. Without money we'd replace it with something else, but it ultimately comes down to the same thing.
Like, I can understand the perfect world without landlords or billionaires and so on, but what's this perfect world look like that has no currency?
Typically societies without money historically operated in what’s called a gift economy. Basically most goods were shared amongst the community. However there are very few remaining today.
Money is fiat currency. Literally a stand in for something with actual value. Money holds no intrinsic value. You can't eat it, you can't breathe it or use it in anyway except to trade for things that do have actual intrinsic value. The only thing money allows humans to do is go into debt. That debt has created a society with insane leaps and bounds in innovation, but the cost is that it's a ponzi scheme that will collapse spectacularly.
Only if you treat debt as something absolute that has to be repaid no matter what.
In reality in many cases debt is written off as impossible to claw back and sold off to unscrupulous debt enforcement companies at a fraction of the nominal value. Who in turn also rarely manage to get the money.
We as society could simply decide to forget certain types of debt and basically that is what states do via inflation and which historically many societies have done via debt jubilees.
The book "Debt the first 5000 years" gives good overview on this matter and fiat currencies in general.
You mean 'any way', right?
I see what you're trying to say. But I gotta ask tho: did "we all" actually, really agree on that?
Careful with that thinking there, mister. Soon enough you'll be rederiving civilisation and suggesting things like power structures and statutory social order.
the origin of the idea is that since you can no longer simply go exchange your money for its equivalence in actually valuable metals, you can't expect prices to be based on the value of their material components and labour any more. Money is no longer a promisory note for gold. Admittedly, that logic is a little iffy, and yet the threat has come true:
the more updated version of that is to simply go to any big store and look at the prices - say, $65 for a DVI to HDMI signal converter - and see that price has been divorced from the real value of products in favor of capitalist bullshit like artificial scarcity and the total enshittification of society, which i daresay has already been achieved.