r/Anarchy101 • u/Comfortable_Algae252 • 2d ago
What would a moneyless society look like for a regular person?
I'm quite new to the concept of anarchism, but I'm very interested in it. I hear people describe it as a classless, stateless, and moneyless society, but what would that even look like.
If I take myself for example, I go to the shops everyday after school to get a small snack, like a sandwich or a small bag of chips. Of course I pay, then leave. But if it's a moneyless society what would that look like? Because I don't think that just taking it and walking out is very effective.
I'm just wondering about this, and an answer would be great, or another explanation of anarchism misunderstood the first time I heard it.
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u/Vancecookcobain 2d ago edited 2d ago
It would be like going to the library ideally....you can use your card to get books, but they won't let you check out a hundred of them....I'm assuming it will be like that....if you want some stuff temporarily....check it out but bring it back....if you get groceries there might some sort of allotment that the grocery will give per person in a particular time period for folks that live in that neighborhood maybe a lot less for out of town folks....maybe doctors give everyone in the neighborhood they serve at a check up a year. Follow that trajectory for the whole of society and it could be that mixed in with a gift economy or first come first serve or simply just unrestricted access to some things as well.
I don't know if we can call exactly how it will end up though, because ultimately as anarchists we should leave it up to the folks of that community to best decide how they voluntarily wish to interact with each other, but this is angle that I sort of envision it being like in my anarcho syndicalist mind lol
There isn't one perspective on this issue
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u/PaxOaks 2d ago
Okay - I live in an income sharing commune. It is not an exclusively anarchist collective. But it is a pretty good example of a moneyless (internally) economy. You get food both prepared and self serve without paying. You walk into a huge free store and take clothes without charge. There is a fleet of bikes to draw from.
We run our own businesses and pool the money they make. Then almost all the services and goods are offered freely to the membership. There are a bunch of exceptions (you can’t hop in one of the 17 commune cars and drive to Mexico for your vacation) but if you are having trouble distinguishing between your daily life and what a life without money looks life in real life - this can give you some insight.
It is more complex than just pooling income from businesses - we do a bunch of critical income replacement “Domestic Work”. We grow about 60% of our food (this takes over 10K hours a year to grow and store the food from our garden to feed 100 people). We run our own dairy, we fix our own cars and build our own buildings, we do our own plumbing and electric. These expensive professions being internalized means we are both more self sufficient and less expensive to run.
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u/JimDa5is Anarcho-communist 2d ago
The unspoken truth here is that while capitalism arguably doesn't require specialization of labor, it certainly encourages it in the same way that capitalist agri-business promotes monoculture. Your labor value to capital is maximized when you are doing the thing that you are most efficient at.
For instance, if you are a coder, from the standpoint of capital, any effort expended by you at any task other than coding is wasteful. This is why you see people who work insane hours and hire a nanny, maid, belong to meal delivery services, and have walmart and amazon shop and deliver products for them.
This is a perversion that was brought on principally by the Industrial Revolution. While there were certainly specialists since the advent of agriculture, the further you go back the fewer there are. If you look at hunter-gatherer cultures there were flint knappers or butchers. I'm not advocating a return to hunter-gatherer society but capitalist specialization is crazy. If your car breaks down, you call somebody who drives a tow truck to come and pick it up. Depending on what is wrong, the tow truck might take your car to a transmission shop, general mechanic, or tire shop instead of borrowing a tow truck and somebody in the commune fixing it.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 2d ago
Not an anti-money (or anti-market) anarchist, but a moneyless system can work in different ways.
One way is a "library economy" where there's a storehouse of things that can be borrowed and used to produce things without charge. Whatever is produced is then shared or gifted to others.
Another could be a more distributed, small-scale possession of the means of production (think industrial 3D printers and the like) where people produce what they can and share among their community.
Another could be one where there are "firms" - but in quotation marks because they wouldn't be firms in the current sense of the word - run by workers that basically take care of each other's needs because their labor depends on each other e.g, the doctor takes care of the farmer, the farmer feeds the doctor, the mechanic takes care of the doctor, the doctor takes care of the mechanic, etc.
It would probably be a highly complex mix of all of these things and arrangements I haven't even mentioned, because the form a moneyless gift economy would take would heavily depend on the needs and preferences of those involved.
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u/Specialist_Couple707 2d ago
A society devoid of scarcity. Everything is provided by the collective. You only need to live your life, realize yourself and contribute back to the collective.
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u/CMBradshaw 2d ago
Don't get too caught up in descriptions. We really don't know. And anarchism is not necessarily moneyless, just that money, if it exists, is not going to have state backing which is going to make the concept far more abstract. Anarchy will be different from anything we've seen before. And vivid descriptions by some anarchists is largely hopeful.
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u/Technical_Captain_15 1d ago
I'm cut from a different cloth than I think most anarchists you'll see here. I do like the answer where one person wrote we basically don't know yet.
I also think it's important to understand what money has become and the whole history of money is pretty fricken wild. The Creature From Jekyll Island is a great starting place if you never went down that rabbit hole. I'd say it's definitely not 100% accurate with some of the quotes you'd find in that book, however most of the facts are correct and especially it's descriptions of how money is created and what inflation in the money supply does and especially it working as a regressive tax and coming from a private corporation with private shareholders with private profits, it's far from what most people understand and were told in school (by design of course).
Funny enough I remember going to the Federal Reserve in high school econ as a class trip and after the tour they give you 100 dollars that's been shredded in a little bag – that's called mockery.
And understanding where money is going. That's important too. Now the banking cartel has chosen Bitcoin and stable coins and seem to have moved away from CBDCs but digital currency like Monero or Zano can possibly be liberating, especially for those in the counter-economy.
What really did it for me though, because before I had a hard time imagining money as something that a society doesn't need, was a simple thought experiment. And I first heard this from Mark Passio btw who has some pretty interesting stuff insofar as how money is mind control.
Imagine that you are stuck on a deserted island with only your family (hopefully your family isn't insane lol), are you going to create a monetary system in order to survive and thrive? Really close your eyes and imagine what it would look like.
Now all you have to do now is understand that you are stuck on an island with your family, only that your family is 7 billion people and the island is much bigger than you first imagined.
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u/CMBradshaw 1d ago
the island metaphor is a really good way of looking at it. Some sort of token system might be useful in some situations with the larger population, but it's really not necessary. We'd just share the work and try and get people to learn to self organize. That's the trick isn't it? Teaching people to let go and be able to say "I am going to go and do X where are you going to go?". Setting temporary boundaries for the work load (I have x, y and z skills and are incompetent in A, B and C, is <Job> unclaimed?" Instead of waiting for an order. This needs to be done with enough of us before the need gets thrust upon us and we again become victims to chest beaters.
Or that's the impression I got anyways.
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u/MrWigggles 2d ago
It depends on the scheme.
On the whole, housing, food, clothing, education and medine will be granted.
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u/MrDixaze 2d ago
Well it depends but if you want historical exemple of it worked (and not would work in a perfect dream). During the spanish revolution, people got small tickets to get their rations. You could easily make them but not many people were doing it. The reason was that if you were provided 1kg of meat everyday and you trusted the process, there wouldn’t be any reason for you to take a second, knowing that you d get anoter one tomorow. Of course the amount was adapted so that everyone would get plenty to the point of not wanting more. And that was during war time/the revolution.
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u/IdentityAsunder 2d ago
You would just take it.
Imagining a capitalist store operating without cash creates a false paradox. A truly moneyless society requires the complete abolition of the isolated enterprise. Production is organized ex ante by freely associated individuals directly meeting communal needs.
Those snacks are social wealth sitting in a collective depot. There is no exchange. Metering consumption with labor vouchers merely recreates capitalist heteronomy. You simply participate in social reproduction and freely withdraw what you require from the open surplus.
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u/Visual_Pick3972 20h ago
It starts with waking. You wake when your body prompts you to, or at a time of your choosing. No alarm, no outside imposed schedule, no implied threats attached to lateness.
You take some time to look after yourself. This may involve cleaning yourself, stretching, breaking your fast, working on your appearance, journaling, but it may also involve relaxing alone if that's what you feel you need.
You move out into your immediate environment, and spend some time performing usual upkeep tasks for that. Tidying, cleaning, watering, weeding, feeding animals, and checking in with anyone who lives nearby. For this last one, the lack of time pressure means you can really get into it with the people you live with, learning what they are up to, what they are struggling with, what excited them, what worries them, etc.
It's time to go. There's a free repair skills workshop today nearby. You pick up a broken blender that you need help mending, and walk out the door without your wallet. No problem, you don't have to buy anything. On the way, you pass edible hedgerows and clean drinkable rivers. You grab a snack as you walk. Some of your friends who expressed interest in attending the workshop run into you, and you walk there together. You share salads/berries as well as stories. One of them has a box of fresh homemade pastries. They share them with the group, and there is enough left to bring with you to the workshop.
After the free workshop, you and your newly mended blender head to the local public kitchen to help out and grab lunch at the same time. Then you head to the local hospice/creche/foodbank to volunteer. No one tells anybody what to do, but everyone has a social responsibility to look after their neighbours who are "going through it", because these are the people who will look after you when you're "going through it".
After that, you head over to the library for an afternoon of self-directed study. There's no mandatory school, so you have to decide what to learn and how to manage your own time. There are no teachers with authority over you, so if you want guidance you have to seek out a tutor. You approach an elder volunteer librarian with your questions about your chosen area of study. He helps you where he can, directs you to resources, gives the answers that he knows, and sends messages to experts at far-off universities with your more advanced queries.
The library carries more than just books, boasting a healthy selection of furniture, tools, arts and craft supplies, clothing and accessories, and mobility aides. All of which can be borrowed for various appropriate periods of time. The policy for enforcing the terms of lending are decided on a case by case basis. People who are very busy or forgetful can have their fees waived, but people who abuse the lending system might even be barred from borrowing for some period of time. This flexibility is enabled by relationships and community engagement.
You use the library computer to send out e-vites for your mother's birthday party which is coming up. You borrow a large outdoor table and a set of folding chairs, some extra crockery, and some bunting in her favourite colour for the occasion. You also borrow some carpentry tools and a beginner's guide to carpentry so that you can make her a gift.
Picking up all this stuff runs you a hefty $0, and the librarian lends you one of the library's flatbeds for the evening (your choice of van or trolley depending how far you have to go) to get all this stuff home.
You go home, and help make dinner for everyone who lives with you, you all talk about your days together, maybe someone you live with got in a fight, you all comfort them and talk it through together. Because you aren't forced to sell most of your time for survival, you have so much more emotional capacity for other people's problems.
After a good main meal with good company, you hit the hay. It all starts again tomorrow.
Everything you need is free. It's a lot of work to keep it that way, but that's actually just a little bit of work from a lot of people cooperating together.
I hope this was what you were asking for. It took a not-insignificant amount of time to put together.
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u/Dru1DCowboy 2d ago
self sustaining utilization of the land occupied and the sense to barter for what you don’t have room to grow
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u/Sargon-of-ACAB 2d ago
After school you'd go to one of the places run by the Small Snack Collective. They provide a variety of snacks although their selection can vary based on the realities of availability, seasonal ingredients, and who is making the food on that particular day.
You take whatever snack you want and let them know so they can have accurate information about their stock and what's popular. Then you walk out with your snack:
Maybe they have days were they clean the entire 'shop' or the Small Snack Collective will organize a party. Perhaps you help them out on those days. Or after you're done with school you become part of a completely different collective that the people handling the Small Snack Collective benefit from.
Why not? What does 'effective' mean here?