how should the world’s economy develop? what companies should be developed? how should the profit be distributed? should it be illegal for companies to make a profit at all?
(note that i think that it is generally unavoidable that some companies make some profit, the grey area on the image of the supply-demand diagram (or rather quantity-price diagram) is the profit, and that would only be zero if all companies have exactly the same production costs per unit.)
They make profit because they shift costs onto us in the form of environmental destruction, health crises, dysfunctional politics, hostile city planning, etc.
The idea that the balance sheet of an oil company reflects all its costs is exactly what’s wrong with the stock market. That balance sheet reflects the costs they pay while they are enabled and incentivized to shift as much cost as possible onto the rest of us.
what companies should be developed? how should the profit be distributed?
Corporations shouldn’t exist, and neither should money. There should be no such thing as profit
You’re right and I agree, but I’ve yet to find a way that works that doesn’t fail in scale. Even in a small scale in a setting in which nothing is genuinely needed, resource hoarding becomes an issue and a point of conflict between arbitrarily defined groups. We’ve seen it in life, we’ve seen it in studies, fuck I’ve accidentally recreated the exact situation in more than one Minecraft server. What is the transitional medium that moved us to a currency free society? If we just abolish money people will form pseudo currencies to shorthand exchange.
Yeah, like money is extremely convenient. I don’t really feel like picking up cattle poop, and driving them 20 miles into town the next time I need to buy a computer.
Yeah how is a homebuilder supposed to get a new pair of shoes if the cobbler already has a house? Besides, he doesn’t need 10,000 pair of shoes, but a house is certainly worth more than one pair of shoes.
When the cobbler needs a house, is he supposed to give the homebuilder 10,000 pairs of shoes? The homebuilder doesn’t need that many!
Money, or currency rather, is a token of value. It represents value in a way that we all collectively agree on, providing a (relatively) stable constant from which we can set our prices and barter.
It doesn’t help if you and some guy agree that a few beads and buttons are worth such-and-such amount, if you then take those beads and buttons to another guy and he thinks they’re worth far less.
At least with a stable currency, $5 is $5 (more or less; international currencies and exchange rates add abstraction, but the currencies themselves provide a relatively stable baseline).
It used to be that legal tender was merely a bank note that represented a very real amount-by-weight of precious metals stored in a bank vault somewhere. I have mixed feelings about abandoning the gold standard, but I get that it was a pragmatic move to get out of the great depression.
Long-term however, it leaves us with a fiat currency that’s based on no real value other than the agreement that it’s worth something. This led to the government being able to print new money whenever it wanted, which doesn’t create value but only dilutes the value represented by each unit of currency.
Eventually they didn’t even have to print physical money anymore; it’s just numbers in a computer. And that number can keep getting bigger and bigger; it’s not creating any new value, it’s merely devaluing the rest of that currency that already existed. Effectively siphoning the buying-power away from people who already have a set income and some savings.
It’s a fucked up situation at this point and there’s no easy way out of it, but simply abolishing money as a concept is not gonna do it. That’s just some utopian dreamworld concept that simply would not work in real life.
Barter economies have always been a myth. There have been several indigenous economies that didn’t rely on money or barter.
The reason currency has value is because it’s backed by the monopoly of violence by the state, not a mutual agreement.
There have been several indigenous economies that didn’t rely on money or barter.
Did they engage in any form of trade? Or did they just give things away for free?
Also, what sources do you have to support this? Is it based on archaeology, because I’m not sure how you can verify a negative using the archaeological record. Archaeologists are usually pretty self-aware about the limitations of their knowledge. Or are you citing ethnography?
The reason currency has value is because it’s backed by the monopoly of violence by the state, not a mutual agreement.
If you’re not implicitly agreeing that money has value, then why don’t you burn all your bank notes? Empty your accounts and stop working for wages if you don’t agree that currency has value.
“State monopoly on violence” is a thought-stopper in this context. Yes, the state has a monopoly on violence that they use to protect the interests of capital, and that’s obviously bad. But that doesn’t immediately and uncritically extend to “currency only has value because it’s enforced by state-monopolized violence.” And it’s possible to abolish capital without abolishing currency. The former is feasible; the latter isn’t.
You didn’t engage with any point I actually made in my previous comment, you just parroted some old worn-out anti-money tropes. Believe me, I’ve considered them all quite thoroughly already. I was twenty once too. They don’t hold up to scrutiny.
This conversation would work a lot better if you didn’t try to insult me by implying I’m naive. I’ve thought about these things extensively as well, and determined that it’s possible to have a moneyless society. Coming to a different conclusion does not make me naive.
Did they engage in any form of trade?
Trading is not the same thing as bartering.
did they just give things away for free?
Some of them did, yes. Gift economies exist into the modern day in Papua New Guinea. When community leader A visits community B, community B offers leader A several gifts to help community A thrive. When leader B visits community A, they do the same thing in return.
Here are a few sources. I’m not a particular fan of the one source framing the Inca empire as a “communist experiment”, or their implications that a merchant class would have stopped imperialism, but it explains the dynamics.
If you’re not implicitly agreeing that money has value, then why don’t you burn all your bank notes
That would imply that my material conditions allow me to survive without money. Money is a social construct. I don’t agree with it, but I’m forced to use it due to the violence from the state. Wherever and whenever I can, I distribute my money to help people in need.
Okay, I apologize for being unnecessarily harsh. I was losing patience with trolls in a different thread, but it wasn’t called for here with you and I shouldn’t have vented my frustration on you. I’ll own that.
I will, however, maintain that some form of value-representation is necessary in society, and that if it isn’t going to be money (or more precisely, currency) then it needs to be something else which currently evades my imagination.
Trading is not the same thing as bartering.
You’re right it’s not the same thing. But it requires some basis of exchange. Bartering implies exchanging direct goods of comparable value. Money implies representations of value in some agreed-upon form of currency that can be exchanged.
If you’re saying that neither of those things are necessary, that implies that either A), there’s some other basis of exchange that could underlie a system of trade without being barter- or currency- based; or B), trade itself isn’t necessary and that these societies somehow got by without it.
Gift economies exist into the modern day in Papua New Guinea.
Gift economies don’t scale well. They only work when communities have close enough ties to feel enough goodwill towards each other to share from their bounty while asking nothing in return, and also trust each other enough to reciprocate in due course.
That might work on an island nation populated by tribal cultures who share common ancestors and are presumably bound to each other by culture, kinship, and tradition. But Indonesia’s actions in West Papua and the refugee crisis it creates show how that plays out long-term when civilizations inevitably come into contact with other civilizations.
Money is a social construct. I don’t agree with it, but I’m forced to use it due to the violence from the state
Social constructs are literally things that people collectively agree on. There’s a difference between agreeing with and agreeing on.
When you go out to eat and pass by a restaurant because it’s too pricey, you’re saying “my money is worth more than they’re offering for that amount.” When you go someplace cheaper, you get more for the amount you spend. These are the kind of actions that on the collective level add up to “agreeing on” how much money is worth.
There’s more nuance to it than that obviously, and none of us individually has the ability to just wish our money to have more buying power. But that’s the overall dynamic, and there’s no cop standing over you saying “No, you will go to that overpriced restaurant and pay $30 for a cheeseburger.”
The state monopoly on violence enforces some things, which can be unjust. For instance, criminalizing homelessness. Or evicting tenants due to laws that favor landlords. But they can’t arrest you for refusing a job offer because the pay was too low (don’t give the fascists any ideas though).
Although there is the caveat that a place to live implies land to live on, and a structure to live in. That land has value by nature of the fact that it isn’t infinite. The idea of people being able to “own” a piece of the earth is questionable, but at the same time, if you’ve built a home somewhere, then you deserve legal protections so that some rando can’t come along and evict you just because “you don’t own the land.”
Beyond that, the structure required labor, equipment, materials, and time to build. Those materials equipment took labor, equipment, materials, and time to produce. The skills of the labor took time and effort to develop. So unless you want all those components to fall into place for free (meaning slave labor), then the final product, the home, has a certain value.
Providing housing for millions and billions of people requires resources and labor. That all has to come from somewhere, and all the way up the supply chain the labor needs to be compensated (ideally fairly).
The same applies to feeding the masses. People require food and water, and those things require labor, equipment, materials, and labor to produce, store, and distribute. Everyone up the supply chain requires some form of compensation for their time, effort, and expertise.
So what do you suggest we compensate them with if we abolish money, so that they can go on to afford the necessities for themselves (including a home, food, utilities, clothes, etc.) and preferably some nice things like hobbies, nights out, road trips, etc.?
I’m not arguing that the systems currently in place aren’t unjust and heavily skewed to favor the rich and disadvantage the poor. Obviously they are and that needs to change. But abolishing money is overly simplistic and wouldn’t actually solve the problems. The rich would still own the means of production, the state would still have a monopoly on violence, and the poor would still be marginalized. The only difference is that the rich would no longer have to pay out even a meager pittance to the poor for their labor.
Don’t act like people can just work for free and trust that all their needs will be provided for. We’re talking about the real world here.
Thank you, and apology accepted. I understand how that trolling could bleed into this conversation, it’s happened to me before as well.
there’s some other basis of exchange that could underlie a system of trade without being barter- or currency- based
That’s literally what the moka exchange is in Papua New Guinea. They exchange things like pigs and other goods for prestige. I agree with your point that it doesn’t scale well for our modern global economy, but we don’t need to revert to historical examples for a moneyless society. I’ll give you my idea for a moneyless society further down in this comment.
You make a great point about social constructs in general, and it’s one that I agree with in most cases. However in the case of money, I’d argue that money as a construct has been forced upon us by the powerful and enforced by the state. Money as a concept arose by the powerful to control the weak. In ancient Rome, money was the basis for their politics. The Plebian class had a single vote, and it required immense amounts of money to be a senator (still true, but I digress). To earn favor politicians would absolve the debts of Plebians, especially in the late Roman period by Emperors. Sometimes, their debts would force Plebians to sell themselves into slavery.
The Plebians did not get to choose whether they should use money, but rather it was imposed on them by the wealthy. I’d argue that money as a social construct was agreed upon by the powerful, and then imposed upon the working class throughout history. The lines have blurred for us, because through the centuries the merchant class arose and has become distinct from the political class. Money became a convenient method of control, especially in feudal and now capitalist society.
I feel like now is a good time to explain what I think a modern moneyless economy would look like. It’s called a library economy. Goods are distributed through libraries, which function as a central hub for a community economy. The entire community contributes to meeting the needs of the community. When housing needs to be built, the whole community contributes. When food needs to be grown, the whole community devotes some time to tending community farms, and then distributes food through food banks. The community ensures the needs of their community members are met. Goods beyond necessities are created by people doing what they want at a sustainable pace. Because the community relies on each other for everything, there is a huge incentive to return things like tools when they are no longer needed. If an emergency occurs and there’s an immediate need for a good, the library can employ any number of mutually agreed upon methods for meeting this emergent need.
Groups of people can work together on an equal level to create more complex goods. The library manages all of this, and the workers utilize a union to ensure that there is no abuse from the library. The library and the unions work together to coordinate with other communities to meet the needs of each other. E.g. a community with workers skilled in manufacturing a part for a cellphone negotiate with another community through their unions, facilitated by the libraries, to meet the needs of cellphones for both communities. The workers then vote on the negotiated deal.
I was browsing on my alt when I noticed your comment. For some reason, your comment doesn’t appear on blahaj.
The solution in my eyes is a library economy. Left unmanaged, the commons are subject to hoarding. So the solution is to distribute goods equitably.
This is honestly the first time someone has offered any solution to this when I ask and I really feel like you’ve got a good idea. If we had a system of reliable distribution for necessities and properly served the excess we actually produce, eventually the recognition that it’s always available will set in and the need for excess will decrease.
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Why? What does the corporate structure make possible that would be prevented by eliminating the structure? What are the benefits of the structure?
It creates a hierarchy in which one person’s opinions are more valuable than another’s and projects power over others unnecessarily. Corporate structure is how we’re separated from our surplus value. I don’t see any benefits to it at all.
But how. You’re just saying things. Slogans don’t make things true.
Do you realize all it takes to make a corporation is 800 dollars in the United States?
Nothing I said is a slogan. It’s an analysis of the dynamics of a corporation. Additionally, what bearing does the cost of starting a business have on this conversation?
Now that that’s out of the way,
But how
Good question. Think about the company you work for. What would happen if you suggested a good idea to your boss, but they disagreed? What inherent right gives their opinion more importance? Why should $800 be the deciding factor on who carries all the power in a workplace?
What does that have to do with incorporation? I’ll save you some time since you’re wasting mine, absolutely nothing, that is workplace bullshit.
The person that formed the business is the boss.
Okay how basic do you need me to dumb this down. It is not the business structure you are complaining about. It is the fact that you have to work.
Profit for solving problems is good. But when your customer is a nation’s government and their “problems” are only framed as such from an evil perspective, then profiting from that evil is also evil.
Call me old fashioned, but investing should be about backing an idea or entity whose mission you support, not a get rich quick scheme.
Transhumans-R-Us is and has been doing some legitimately exciting work for the last fifteen years. Wasn’t paying attention veggie that so idk
Profits should be spread equally to everyone.
BlackRock just makes funds that aggregate other companies. They’re no more evil than the underlying companies. And plenty of their underlying companies are perfectly innocuous. We just take it for granted that all corporations are evil because the evil ones are all we hear about.
That’s both technically correct and incredibly misleading. It sets the boundary conditions that incentivize incredibly harmful behavior.
The point is, we should punish the behavior, and ignore the structure that people keep focusing on.
It’s stupid to fight against the way companies are structured. Unless they do highly regulated work, then we can mandate specifically how they can look like. But it’s stupid to mandate how they can’t be.
Also, people like to point just the second half of it to dishonestly claim we shouldn’t do anything. But dishonest people claiming something doesn’t make it wrong, they are perfectly capable to saying true things too.
It’s stupid to fight against the way companies are structured.
You do realize the main aim of incorporation is to shield the officers from liability right?
The structure is how they stay out of jail. How, when we go to freeze assets there’s nothing there. The structure is an integral part of the crime.
Go take another look at what limited liability actually means. Because you don’t seem to have understood the concept.
I definitely did nothing to deserve that tone. Either engage and explain or kindly eff the eff off.
What can I say? The concepts on your comment are wrong, none of it works this way, and even deciding to talk about liability limitation in a criminal context is wrong.
You didn’t understand what it’s about.
What’s misleading? I think it follows pretty clearly from what I said that if you are worried about the ethics of companies you invest in then you shouldn’t invest in broad index funds like BlackRock makes.
I don’t understand what you mean by boundary conditions.
