Its time for the END of capitalism! No poor, no rich, just sharing resources...

[professorjpj]

As long as we have "money", we will ALWAYS have rich and extravagant living, and then the poor, starving, destitute and homeless... The ONLY way to eliminate this is to ELIMINATE money itself, the whole system.. Where ALL men are truly "equal", and no man has more then another.. It could be done... In fact, this may be the only country and landmass in the world where it would be feasible.. Ive seen the effects of greed, and out of control capitalism, and its as evil as it can get.. We need something better... Otherwise, we are truly LOST!! Thoughts?

 

[raaya79]

Hummmmm. Im not a fan of capitalism either, but generally speaking human beings are still in the monkey brain phase of evolution so im not sure what system would suffice. . There have been some really beautiful ideals and systems thought up in the 19th and 20th centurys only to be hoodwinked and destroyed by the monkey brain minset mentioned before.. Equality is a tough one. Unfortunately no one is born equal, we are all born with certain predetermined qualities. ...

 

[Matt Derrick]

i'm a self-described anarchist, but i just can't see the world without some form of currency exchange while having a large scale populace.

 

[Skit]

End wealth, not poverty.

 

[Ristoncor]

I mean, currency only has value when people acknowledge it does. I remember hearing about some sort of Pacific Islanders who's currency was rocks. And the larger the rock, the more it was worth. I suppose we could move back to the barter system, it would make us more "equal," in a way I suppose, though it would be more cumbersome. I guess the question is then: should we sacrifice convenience for equality? But even in a barter system, people wouldn't necessarily be equal; just think of disabled people or people with mental/physical handicaps who's labors provide mediocre returns. So, I guess my answer is: I'm not quite sure.

 

[raaya79]

I think the question ultimately comes down to human nature. The human mind has a amazing ability to adapt to its environment. So i think we could have a much more equal socety ' as far as income inequality goes' but i dont think a perfect world is possible considering the deeply ingrained propensity towards power and control in the human psych. ..

 

[Ristoncor]

but i dont think a perfect world is possible considering the deeply ingrained propensity towards power and control in the human psych

^This. Someone was applying this to things like paying taxes to get Medicare later on and stuff like that. People are going to have to give up some "comfort" if they want to be more free. But the question is: will they?

 

[raaya79]

^This. Someone was applying this to things like paying taxes to get Medicare later on and stuff like that. People are going to have to give up some "comfort" if they want to be more free. But the question is: will they?

I think it all depends on the morals of said society. Human beings are capable of doing many things... Do i think the people around me would cheat the system if they could, yes, no doubt about it. They have no faith in the institutions that rule them, but, in the same breath, they wouldnt risk their security and well being to challenge that same system that they have no faith in..Most people are more concerned with food and self preservation than really changing the outlining system that enslave them.. Plus, the propaganda system in this country is exquisite. ..

 

[Kim Chee]

Make money illegal? That would be Un-American...and it is my God given right to have money. I pay taxes, dammit!
Haha...seriously.

Money (or the lack of surely divides us).

There is also another thing that divides us: willingness to work.

If greed weren't so prevalent, there would be more to go around.

Yep. Greed. There's your problem, it isn't money.

 

[Rover]

I think that money, and capitalism are symptoms of the problem, rather than the cause.

 

[Thrasymachus]

You guys need to read Debt the First 5000 years by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. My favorite podcast even turned it into a free audiobook:
http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years

Before money according to Graeber no one really went around bartering and say trading 20 chickens for a certain amount of bread, as Adam Smith supposed out of his ass. Infact according to the research of historian Dr Craig Muldrew who has done primary research on this time period, even during the time of Smith, a very, very tiny and wealthy minority of British used money instead of the dominant local credit systems for their daily needs. Smith knew this, he just invented the myth of barter exchange, but Graeber says that anthropologists always knew that economists were full of it on this, because they never found examples of barter being used to circulate goods on a large scale, the way we use money. What societies before money was used is local credit systems. Money and coinage arose according to historical evidence where large numbers of soldiers, especially mercenaries were. To field and provision 10,000 soldiers you would need just as many or more people on the back-end producing their gear, their tents/shelter, farming their food, transporting it all, etc. In pre-modern times, remember, it was not like today where only 1% of the population is actually engaged in agriculture by trade, they didn't have the manpower to spare to have a huge standing army and just as many or more, supporting this army full-time. Rulers learned the best way to provision their armies, was to circulate a currency and demand that everyone in their state pay back a certain portion as taxes, that way essentially everyone is doing their small part to help keep the army maintained. Graeber points out that in one podcast or talk that it would not have been a good idea to use the traditional method of extending local credit to anywhere large number of heavily armed soldiers are temporarily staying. How could the local merchants, shop-keepers or farmer enforce that they stick to the credit arrangement and pay it back, before they left?

More on why money is a negative force in the world, unlike some above naively suppose:

Suppose I have twelve loaves of bread, and you are hungry. I cannot eat so much bread before it goes stale, so I am happy to lend some of it to you. “Here, take these six loaves,” I say, “and when you have bread in the future, you can give me six loaves back again.” I give you six fresh loaves now, and you give me six fresh loaves sometime in the future.

In a world where the things we need and use go bad, sharing comes naturally. The hoarder ends up sitting alone atop a pile of stale bread, rusty tools, and spoiled fruit, and no one wants to help him, for he has helped no one. Money today, however, is not like bread, fruit, or indeed any natural object. It is the lone exception to nature’s law of return, the law of life, death, and rebirth, which says that all things ultimately return to their source. Money does not decay over time, but in its abstraction from physicality, it remains changeless or even grows with time, exponentially, thanks to the power of interest.

source:
Sacred Economics: Chapter 12, Negative-Interest Economics

The only reason why people can dumpster dive reliably is because live in a money based society and so in the United States almost 50% of food is wasted somehow or other before being eaten. Often times when riding my bicycle, I will snoop into the local electronics recycling trailers of my town or neighboring municipalities. Often you can find perfectly good laptops, GPSs, video game systems, mice, etc. Why? Because our society only really values money over and against everything else. In a society that had other values the scale of waste we think is normal would be morally repugnant. But things in themselves are not valuable, even the environment or human life, in a money based society -- only money is truly valorized at the expense of everything else. And it is not just worth it monetarily for stores to not waste food they cannot turn into money, just like it is not worth it monetarily for many middle class families to rehome the obsolete but often otherwise working and functional electronics instead of chucking it.

The structure and goal of a capitalist society is to liquidate everything: the lived environment, the living eco-system, and even human life as expressed in wage hours, which are in the process de-valued, into a fetishized representative of itself. We call this ghostly, and deadly symbol -- money.

 

[mumblz]

I think equality based on 'stuff' is superficial at best. Equality is based on relative perceptions... imo we need a cultural overhaul and an economy that is reflective of that.

 

[TWTP]

"Love is knowing I am everything. Wisdom is knowing I am nothing. My life moves between the two."

If most humans beings got on board with this idea I don't think it would much matter what economic system you contextualized their actions in, capitalist or collectivist. Ultimately both those systems are based on the same religion, which is "individualism", or the idea that human beings are objects of a type similar to things like chairs, computers, or even concepts like "blue" or "stupid", and that we can play with them in the same ways we can play with these objects, with predictable results.

These objects can be considered as a block (collectivism) or separately (Austrian school capitalism), but the idea that there are such objects to be considering at all, that there is any SUBSTANCE to identity, is the assumption behind both. Human beings are not types of objects, they are processes that can be described in various ways, and if we're serious about a notion like species preservation (I'm no moralist; I'm not saying we SHOULD be concerned with preserving ourselves) then we should deliberately make space for ALL, and I mean all, of these competing methods of description. The crippling hypocrisy of modern "liberalism" when it calls for an end to oppression by means of ideological and economic COERCION proves that many do not understand these ideas; tolerance applies on a meta-level that few "liberals" seem to be aware of.

Identity is always a BECOMING; every noun is really a verb. Any ideology therefore concerned with the identity of individuals is always a sleazy underhanded attempt to CONTROL others, to make them stay the same, and be described ONE way over another way, because identities are, in reality, always in flux (this is the Achilles heel of otherwise laudable programs like feminism, or any other "ism" that seeks to describe some object, in this case "females" or "the feminine", without ever examining the premise whether there indeed IS any such object in the first place. To be fair some feminists have noticed this, i.e. the smart ones, and have written about it). And if you're not convinced that literally no human being, ever, anywhere, should HAVE this control over others, for any reason, then I don't think you've internalized enough world history.

Economics is still the slave of ontology. Fix the broken individualist ontology of the west, and you won't even need to fix its economies. If you want to point a finger for the mistake, blame Judaism, Christianity, and all other dualistic western ontologies, including Kant and his intellectual descendants like John Rawls etc.

For the sources of these ideas, check out Alexander Bard, Nietzsche, Nagarjuna, Heidegger, the Vedas, Joseph Campbell, and probably many other thinkers I haven't read or forget about. Long live the enemies of dualism, enemies by extension of capitalism and collectivism alike!

 

[Tumbleweed]

TWTP, have you considered that the kind of philosophy you are espousing (ontology, the duality of mind, object/subject discussions) can be used as a method of societal control that works for economic injustice not against it? Where do you find published philosophers? In positions of authority at academic institutions, in the employment of the wealthy as members of "think tanks" or as theory specialists, or employed by governments to work on "the big issues", i.e., economics, social justice and the allotment of wealth. Additionally many of the names that you mentioned write in a style that is unintelligible to the vast majority of the people on this planet (including myself, and I have studied philosophy in college) which to me is the best demonstration of why their ideas shouldn't be trusted; only a very elite group can claim any ownership over these ideas and we have to trust this elite to translate these high ideas into common concepts for the 99% of the population that can't understand them without help. So metaphysical speculation becomes another hierarchical system.

 

[Tumbleweed]

Make money illegal? That would be Un-American...and it is my God given right to have money. I pay taxes, dammit!
Haha...seriously.

Money (or the lack of surely divides us).

There is also another thing that divides us: willingness to work.

If greed weren't so prevalent, there would be more to go around.

Yep. Greed. There's your problem, it isn't money.

Thank you for pointing out the inequity that results from varying degrees of willingness to work. That's one side of this discussion that's rarely talked about outside of libertarian message boards, and corporate board rooms I guess (anything said there is a self-serving lie::cigar::!). Modern capitalism and our money systems definitely suck but eliminating money won't make us all free. Fair rates of exchange for goods and services would be a good start but then we have the issue of how to deal with the inequality that will result from one person working more than another and accumulating more as a result. Is that unequal accumulation greed on the part of one who labors more? Maybe...communism says so, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", but history shows that communist/socialist societies haven't found solutions to these problems and seem to result in the same kinds of wealth/power accumulation that we see here in the west.

Maybe the solution is to ignore the problem and make do with what we can accumulate through labor and theft?

 

[TWTP]

TWTP, have you considered that the kind of philosophy you are espousing (ontology, the duality of mind, object/subject discussions)

Hold on a second: you're using that parenthetical list as if all the things in it belong together. Ontology just means the "study of what is", which may or may not include the mind, duality of mind, or discussion of the subject/object division. We want to get rid of bad ontology, and keep a good one. I don't espouse "ontology" generally, I espouse a particular one.

I don't like dualism as an ontology because it sets up a division between the world and "you", and thus writes people a blank check for talking about the "real" vs. the unreal world. I, by contrast, think that a notion of what "you" are as distinct from your world is entirely incoherent, and that therefore talking about yourself, or others, as if they were these static little objects that receive and transmit information through a medium called physical reality, is not only a gross distortion of our actual experience, but actively hinders what the "individual" COULD BE if it was real in the first place, which we don't have any evidence of.

can be used as a method of societal control that works for economic injustice not against it?

Yes, of course philosophy can be used for these purposes, and I have thought about it. The way I see it working in this society is this (and please do let me know what you think of this; it's a model I've developed primarily for explaining the origins of consumerism and if you have any ideas or feedback I'd like to hear it): individualism is the assumption that there are two basic, distinct ontological objects: the self, and the world. Ultimately this induces alienation of the self from the world, and this alienation can then be leveraged by those in power, because all "they" (those around who have resources, including both governments and just manipulative people generally) have to do is convince you that some object x (which they have access to) is the end to the alienation you've been suffering from. Hence the consumerist anticulture of the US, where money and physical possessions are pursued as an end in themselves. This of course works out for the state, because the more stuff you buy, the more you will work to get money, and the more of that income they can tax for wars, etc.!

This notion that there is any reason to acquire physical objects at all comes from the idea that the self is in some significant way very different from the physical world, so that we need to GET what is different from us, because it's something we LACK. But this premise of the state, that we all LACK something, fundamentally, is one of the most insidious lies ever told, and it comes from having a dualistic ontology. The Christian idea of "original sin" is very much similar to this.

If you want to enslave a population, make them enslave themselves. Dictators and men with guns and whips can be overthrown, but it is much harder to overthrow an INTERNAL tyrant. To get someone to enslave themself, convince them they are deficient; give them dualism!

Where do you find published philosophers? In positions of authority at academic institutions, in the employment of the wealthy as members of "think tanks" or as theory specialists, or employed by governments to work on "the big issues", i.e., economics, social justice and the allotment of wealth. Additionally many of the names that you mentioned write in a style that is unintelligible to the vast majority of the people on this planet (including myself, and I have studied philosophy in college) which to me is the best demonstration of why their ideas shouldn't be trusted; only a very elite group can claim any ownership over these ideas and we have to trust this elite to translate these high ideas into common concepts for the 99% of the population that can't understand them without help. So metaphysical speculation becomes another hierarchical system.

Do you fully understand the way in which your computer is operating right now to show you these words? Does your knowledge of it functioning have any impact on it functioning? Is philosophy not just another type of technology like the computer? Does the fact that most cannot understand it bear at all on the question of its usefulness?

Also, why do you think hierarchies are bad?

 

[Kim Chee]

In fact, this may be the only country and landmass in the world where it would be feasible..

Why do you think this country different from any other? By "this" I'm assuming you are referring to the u.s.
This country has a huge military, infrastructure, manufacturing and trade all fueled by money. If anying this country is so dependent on the flow of cash that it would probably quickly go up in flames. Do you think this country would fare any better than Tahiti?

 

[ausbos]

Language (as a system) itself is a method of control. Imagine a world without it!

 

[drewski]

In my opinion, no one is equal on this planet. People have advantages and disadvantages that they're born with that determine whether they will survive and keep breeding or die off. We're no different than any other animal in that respect. As far as capitalism and money, humans will always be greedy whether money exists or not. Some people have good hearts and good intentions, others don't give a shit about anyone else but themselves. That's just the way it is and it's part of the human experience. And I think we are waaaaaay too far into industrial society to eliminate currency and go back to barter and trade. The only way that could possibly happen is the day everything breaks down, the economy is no longer in existance, and we're thrown back into barbaric times.

 

[Matt Dawg]

I think money is more convenient than anything else... I mean, having cash isn't really a far shot away from bartering your goods for someone else's goods.

Let's say we did live in a cashless society, what am I going to do if I want a loaf of bread? As it was mentioned earlier, we're still rockin a primate brain; people will never be so generous as to give me bread whenever I ask for it. So what would I do? Well, obviously I would work for it. I would do some mundane chore and in exchange I would get bread. How is that any different than what I'm doing now? All I have to do is get a job, work for a while, then I can go and buy all the bread I want with the money I earned...

Sure some people have a lot more money and even more people have a lot less; but that spectrum will always exist. The only point in history where there weren't any rich or poor people was way back in the days of the caveman when the population was extremely low and the resources were seemingly never ending. Those people never had to worry because feeding and housing a tribe of 50+ people really isn't that difficult...

I can think of a couple things holding back society that I would much rather try to destroy rather than to waste my time trying to topple an economy....