the question I’d raise is, not whether money existed, but who needed to participate in the money economy. Just as an example, under patriarchy, wives? Slaves? Etc. Exactly who needs to, how, and why? I’m sticking with my main distinction between being paid and being resourced, with being resourced as much the most generally applicable idea.
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Merchants were considered low class. Aristocracy lived luxuriously by demanding tribute from lower ranking classes. This was pretty typical in premodern cultures the world over. Modern Europe upset that value system through the rise of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy. To revert to non-monetized social systems risks reverting to tribute-demanding warlords as well. It’s important to understand the full package.
@RobertBunge I was not intending to be insensitive to your career or the value you are clearly offering. I apologise if I came over as doing that. I’m extremely interested in big picture patterns, and can overlook things in the moment.
I don’t think I’m allergic to Capitalism, it’s not a personal problem. I’m observing it as the primary driver of the destruction of our planet. It’s a system clearly with an upcoming expiry date.
I’m certainly not suggesting we should get rid of money, which is a great technology for exchanging values and place-holding for our former safe position in the tribe.
What I refer to is the industrialised consumer driven job markets (slaves, who manage and pay for their own upkeep and housing), and the upcoming economic collapse as systems burn out. Peak oil, AI, unaffordable housing, rampant debt will all contribute to a global recession the like of which we have never seen.
The following sectors and jobs likely to disappear:,
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Retail & Consumer Services – store clerks, fast fashion workers, low-skill food service, call center staff.
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Transportation & Logistics – drivers, airline staff, shipping support, taxi/ride-share roles.
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Office & Administration – clerks, receptionists, routine accounting, middle management.
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Industrial & Manufacturing – assembly line, chemical-heavy farming, low-skill factory work.
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Fossil Fuel & Energy – oil, gas, coal extraction, and associated support roles.
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Finance & Speculative Markets – brokers, debt collectors, some bank staff.
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Media & Advertising – print journalism, consumer-focused advertising, some TV/media production.
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Education (Industrial Model) – standardized testing, administrative roles, lecture-focused teaching.
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Legal & Bureaucracy – paralegals, document reviewers, routine civil service jobs.
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Hospitality & Leisure – luxury travel, hotel staff, non-essential event management.
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Tech & Routine IT – low-skill IT support, basic coding, social media for consumer brands.
The global South is already paying a heavy price, but the trouble is shifting to the industrialised nations. Money is not food. Being paid can be irrelevant if the shelves are bare.
After the first collapse wave, likely by 2030, the second waves will start to hit. This includes the population collapse, rampant migration from inhabitable areas, water shortages and the failure of harvests as the soils are depleted by chemical and mechanical destruction, the pollinators disappearance, and the disappearance of the fish stocks. We will also get very uncomfortable as storms, floods, droughts heatwaves and fires become common.
I want our young people to be emotionally and physically resilient. To know how to grow a food garden, to value things that matter and not consumer rubbish, to be emotionally invested in community and self regulated in personal and family relations, to vote for the collective good, and to seek peace.
Couldn’t agree more with any of that. As an example, I’m spending a day or two per week on a community farm designed to support developmentally delayed adults. My main contributions so far have included weeding, mowing, loading containers with potting soil, propagating starts,dding moving and restacking bedding frames, farmers market set-up and tear down, and community grill cook. There are teams of younger volunteers in and out from time to time. All this is a really cool model for the future - people living communally on the land and contributing various skills depending on capabilities. Entire schools could run this way - and they should.
As for your list of bullet points above, someone called for a dedicated thread for all that, and it probably deserves one. There are lots of alternative views on which system is likely to fall apart first and what sorts of dominoes will fall after that. Meanwhile, I can source all the free vegetables I want, anytime I want them, so that’s another version of “getting paid”. But mostly, I’m on the farm for inspiration, that’s paying off big time!
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That is beautiful! Yes, let’s make a topic thread.
@rufuspollock I wonder how to structure without the topic becoming overwhelming and messy? I’d like an Obsidian visual map, but I don’t have the tech knowledge to put one here.
We need an “anatomy “of collapse. I personally think the root cause is simple, and altering course likewise. But repair is enormously challenging, complex and domain specific, and rather like Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework needed to be addressed in different ways all according to what type of scenario it presents.
Robert, with respect, this comes across as opinion. I can see the worry behind this… regression to an unequal culture of kings and subjects, etc. But where is the research that backs this up? I have not personally researched this area, so happy to be shown to be mistaken, but shown, not told. What do you say to non monetary systems that currently work? I’m thinking particularly of Will Ruddick and his ideas and practical experiences of commitment pooling, though there must be others.
Here is an excerpt from something I’ve written headed for publication. In summary, any opinion about the future is of course, opinion.
”Technology may save us all – or destroy us all. You can find any opinion you like about the promise and dangers of future technology. So which way will it all turn out? The most honest answer is, none of us really knows. Historian Niall Ferguson points out that forecasting is hazardous, because history is full of random events that can change things abruptly, disrupting any pattern or trend that might have given some notion of a certain or predictable future. Examples cited by Ferguson of such events that few saw coming were the outbreak of World War I, the tsunami that flooded a Japanese nuclear plant in 2011, and the rapid spread of COVID-19. These and other surprising events of both natural and human origin change the course of society in unexpected ways. So just when we expect artificial intelligence, for example, to take over everything, it might not, for reasons we cannot currently imagine. Let’s keep that in mind in the sections that follow! We can certainly use history to spot trends that have developed over time. We can use creative visualization to project what such trends might become if they keep going the way they typically have. But the historical record is also full of sudden and unexpected trend reversals, so nothing that follows in this chapter is in any way a firm “prediction”. More like a roadmap to the future, if the future is kind enough to follow well-worn pathways clearly established in the past. And if the past itself is any indication, any of these well-worn pathways will feature twists and turns and unexpected forks that take us down some not yet discovered road that no one could have ever seen coming.”
I’d say fine, keep researching that!
Last month I wrote a 56 page meta-analysis of macrohistorical theory. That link has been dropped into this forum a few times already, but here is it is again just in case: 2R Paper: History to Future - Google Docs I’d welcome something along the lines of a graduate seminar to unpack the many theorists cited here (or others of similar caliber). On the current point, Karatani is probably most cogent about why capitalism arose from prior command economies. (Which view was derived from a close reading of Marx and many others.) Although experimental “proof” is unobtainable for obvious reasons, it seems plausible that trying to run the historical movie straight backwards will result in a reversion to command economies again. (By way of evidence consider the careers of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.) Anti-capitalism as such may thus be reactionary, not necessarily progressive.
So following Karatani, Pogany, and others, the best sorts of futures I can plausibly imagine involve a throttling back of growth at any cost (Pogany points out such unbounded growth is a thermodynamic impossibility in any case. If human laws don’t adjust, natural law will remind us soon enough.) The era of competing expansive empires must also end, preferably with a whimper, rather than a bang. So all of this is generally post-capitalist, post-state. Except I don’t think capitalism or the state systems are going anywhere (neither do my preferred theorists). Rather, my most hopeful expectation is for evolutionary exaptation in which emergent global collaborative structures reign in, coordinate, and condition the competitive expansive structures that have dominated civilization up until now. The old systems are still going to be there - they are just going to be repurposed in more harmonious ways.
Against that background, experiments in neo-barter (Blockchain or otherwise) are fine with me. All that feeds into the future collaborative global superstructure I imagine will be required to throttle back the excesses of both corporate and geopolitical competition. I literally told my boss two days ago that I don’t want to get paid in money anymore. I want to get “paid” in relationships. Why? Even Bill Gates can’t cut a cheque large enough to change the world. To midwife the world I would prefer to see, only relationships have value. The original point of money, of course, was to access commodities without the overhead of relationships (medieval Japan, for example, was all about relationships). Global complexity required the freedom afforded by cash. It still does. But the next civilizational turn requires a correction back in the direction of enhanced relationships. For some things, it will make the most sense to just trade in the marketplace. Other things will be better obtained through personal connections. Those connections might be more hierarchical or more peer-to-peer. My sense of history is that hierarchical is a sort of cultural default setting. (Plenty of current events to support that perception). But peer-to-peer has thrived in certain circumstances. Peer-to-peer may well arise to set the tone for what happens next. But only if a lot of people are pulling in that direction. It just seems like focusing on the evils of money is distraction from the most critical tasks at hand. To me, blaming money for the evils of the world is akin to pre-scientific medicine attempting to drain the patient of bad blood. It turns out on closer inspection the circulatory system as such is not the root cause of disease, just a few of the things that circulate within it.
For sure…. but I’m hoping that you don’t see all people who are against capitalism as regressive in this way. Yes, they can be, and I have my suspicions about some groups, but I am very ready to believe that some people and groups are moving “beyond” capitalism, not back to the past to before capitalism.
So I’m agreeing with you: anti-capitalism “may” be reactionary, and “not necessarily” progressive. Could we also add, please, that anti-capitalism may be progressive, and not necessarily reactionary?
To me this has a similar feel to people moving forward or back from modernity and post-modernism. We will always have people who yearn for the past, idealising it as the cure for all modern woes, and forgetting to reckon with the severe downsides. But that seems to me much of the thought about metamodernism: how do we move on, not regress?
That’s really the nub of the current practical problem. The pathway “beyond”, generally speaking, runs straight through. It’s tempting to backpedal instead. But returning to some imagined golden age of times gone by is generally not a realistic option. Moreover, all those prior golden ages (of whatever vintage) pointed straight to us in this current moment anyway, so the past will just push us right back to the here and now in any case. My preferred posture is carrying the aspirations of our ancestors through whatever current trials may be, and handing off to future generations beyond us, which generally appears to be what the ancestors would have wished for. Nobody wants to sire the generation that just gives up and quits. And I’m hoping nobody now wants to sire a generation that will have nothing left to live for.
Where this all gets a bit more complex and subtle is I do believe the past offers many sources of inspiration that really do merit a revival. (That’s kind of the whole point of a “second renaissance”, isn’t it?) It’s just that thinking the current version of the world is uniquely wicked is not especially productive in charting a way forward. Nor does pinning the blame on the most massive of systems conceivable (e.g. “civilization”) really focus attention in any useful manner. Cleaning house by throwing out everything and starting over again from scratch is conceptually easy to grasp, but practically unlikely to produce the most desirable results.
I’m not sure I accept being told to defend and justify my anti capitalist stance.
I would like Capitalism to defend its stance. Humanity is poisoned, abused, dominated, extracted, enslaved, manipulated, deceived, excluded from healthcare, excluded from knowledge, has unjust hierarchies imposed, has ingenious lands stored and ruined to extract goods, our seas and our forests are laid bare, species are going extinct, our soils stripped of their worth and fertility, we are taxed to fund both sides of a war. I could go on but it’s just so disheartening. Why are we even still debating it?
Be as anti-capitalist as you like. For me, capitalism is in the category of “force to be reckoned with”. It’s just a system that has been in place for a long, long time, and given that it is very good at perpetuating itself, unless there is a plausible pathway for laying it to rest, it is likely to still be in place for a long, long time. (Note the utter failure of 20th century revolutions to displace capitalism, not to mention many milder social democratic interventions short of revolution).
From your list of particulars, domination and enslavement pre-dated capitalism by quite a few centuries. Taxing for war and unjust hierarchies are of similar pre-capitalist vintage.Manipulation and deception are likely as old as human culture itself - older even - it’s basic predator behavior amongst many species. Seizing of lands and despoiling of resources are also pre-capitalist, albeit capitalism in the modern period added a degree of efficiency to all that. If capitalism were somehow disabled, would knowledge and healthcare spontaneously appear? The track record of socialist governments in such service provisioning is at best mixed - whatever they are doing in Scandinavia and Taiwan is certainly worth a look, however. (For that matter, Canada, which seems all and all better than the US model).
So by all means, let’s mitigate all the evils in the world. The world before capitalism, in general, was only better than the world after capitalism in the sense that resource extraction and human population growth worked a slower pace. But ancient pre-captialist empires were just as rapacious, if not more so. The problem it seems is not so much how to subtract capitalism as it would be to identify what alternative system would be poised to take its place.