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A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

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Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#371

Post by mikem170 »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #346
mikem170 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd buy that. I just didn't know that it was relevant or comparable to modern state backing of the rentier rich. wasn't sure how to judge such a comparison. I know that modern governemnts will send uniformed guys with guns if you mess with a rich persons property. But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else?

>But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else? I'm not sure if you're Aussie, but please understand that problems like domestic violence and incest/rape still exist in Aboriginal communities to a large extent. There are also an army of "nice" middle class, urban white people performing the most mind-bending mental gymnastics possible…

Ah, I wasn't thinking about any of that stuff. I was thinking of whether small economies could exist without economic coercion backed by violence, where this thread started. The Yanamamo were mentioned as a group that doesn't do that, the men and women carry about their work without the need for coercion. You replied that there's violence against low-status members in Aborigines communities, and wondered if the Yanamamo really were non-violent.

I don't know that it's relevant that the Aborigines are violent. Nor, I admit in hindsight, was my reply about modern people also being violent. I intuited that your comment was irrelevant, but didn't do a good job of putting that into words.

The question was whether the proverbial dishes could get done without violence, and if the Yanamamo do it then the answer is "yes", it is possible, regardless of whatever Aborigines or modern people do. I don't think that white guilt over the treatment of Aborigines is relevant to that question, either.

I'm a bit familiar with the Yanamamo. I had a class that focused on them specifically. I know that they have graduations of violence, mostly to do with mating, which can boil over between villages, but I don't remember there being any economic coercion, men and women do their different jobs without any punishment/violence that I can recall.

(A discussion like this could morph into the idea of "women's work", asking why do the Yanamamo men hunt and the women work. But societies using money have the same concept of women's work, so that would be a separate conversation form money vs no-money societies.)

Until someone shows me different, I think the the Yanamamo comment is right, based on my knowledge of them they don't use economic coercion that I know of to proverbially get the dishes washed.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#372

Post by bruiseralmighty »

imtringued wrote: post #183
xondono wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies. That’s one theory, and it’s not even the one Graeber preferred. According to him (and supporting evidence) money originated as a way to “keep score” of debts. The question of the origin of money is an interesting one, but that will be probably be unsolvable, since some of the alternative theories (like barter) would lea…

Yes, money is just a token to keep track of your balance sheet intuitively. Given a secure enough institution we could do it entirely on paper.

This is one of the fundamental principles behind Satoshi's white-paper and all of crypto currency.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#373

Post by s1artibartfast »

curryst wrote: post #362
s1artibartfast wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we agree that the accounting tool changed the possible scale, but we are still trading the same thing. For example, I use currency to track and buy favors from some laborer in China I have never met.

I don't think it's the scale, but the specialization. When what you need is unspecialized manual labor, favors work great because those kinds of favors are fungible. It starts to fall apart when you need specialized work. I.e. I'm a farmer and I need to see a doctor. The doctor doesn't want to see me, though, because 134 other farmers already owe him/her favors and he/she doesn't know what to do with the favors he/sh…

100% agree, fungibility is key advantage of currency over personal IOUs, and that it enabled specialization and scale.

My point was more that serves the same purpose: purchasing services and power. It just does it better.

My post was more a reaction to the moral sentiment that prior to currency, transactions were more equitable and somehow less coercive.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#374

Post by CydeWeys »

School-Cotton wrote: post #195
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, he'd fit more in a hunter-gatherer society because guess what they also don't have... (to spell it out: money). I mostly agree with what you write, but "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type. I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange for some "gifted" groceries and a room. Obvious…

> "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset No it’s not. All socialist/communist societies required all able-bodied people to work, described themselves as worker-led, and idolized work in their propaganda.

Good point. The hammer and sickle aren't implements of leisure, after all.

It's really all societies that require capable people to pull their own weight, not just capitalism. Even money-free communes/kibbutzes have chore rotations and expect everyone to pull their own weight regarding necessary tasks like farming, cooking, cleaning, maintenance, child-raising, etc.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#375

Post by samatman »

bernawil wrote: post #310
samatman wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money in a broad sense is as old as anatomically modern humans, so, no. 80,000 year old grave goods have been discovered, consisting of shells of a consistent size, with holes drilled in them, a few hundred kilometers from the ocean. We know from ethnography of societies which existed until very recently that these collectibles served the same purpose as money. A good complement to Graeber's book is the work of Nick…

The book (Debt, The First 5,000 Years) goes over this (IIRC it's in the Games with Sex and Death chapter). It says that these kinds of "weird money" examples like stone wheels in Micronesia, where not really used to trade for goods, but more or less to trade in social favors / honor systems. The early mesopotamian cilivilazations got debt and credit before there was coinage. Farmers bought goods on credit, the debt s…

Debt, the First 5,000 Years is not the only text on this subject and it isn't canon.

He's meaningfully wrong about a lot of things, and he's missing the 75,000 years prior to his story beginning completely.

I strongly suggest reading some Szabo to fill that picture in. Shell money (ivory money sometimes) was a lot more money-like than Yap stones are.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#376

Post by samatman »

mikem170 wrote: post #304
samatman wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Communities of Iroquois Native Americans Had wampum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum Which was absolutely used as trade goods between Iroquois bands, between the Iroquois and other natives, and between the Iroquois and settler colonialists. Standardized trade goods, portable and of a broadly recognized value: in other words, money. Money which was good enough that the English, being kept short of coin by the Cr…

Like I said, the original post I replied to seemed to say they couldn't imagine the dishes getting done without money: "He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?" I'm fairly certain the Iroquois didn't need to trade wampum with other bands to get the dishes washed? Just like you said you don't need to pay someone in your family to do the dishes, families (and friends…

> humans cannot possibly organize activities amongst themselves without wampum of some sort

Yes, insofar as every band of humans has edges, and on those edges money is a hard prerequisite. We've coevolved with it since the dawn of anatomical modernity, the burden of proof is very much on anyone who wishes to claim that that we can get along without it.

I guess I consider the existence of activities, even economic ones which don't involved the exchange of money, to be trivial? Like it's obvious they exist, it isn't saying very much to point them out?

I spent a lot of my youth in an ashram with up to about 10,000 people in it, and the dishes got washed. The breakdown of that kind of basic uncompensated labor in small (usually flat/anarchist) communes says more about their inability to escape atomization than about the possibility of doing so.

I don't get the sense we're disagreeing about much if anything here, though. Perhaps choosing to emphasize different pieces of the puzzle.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#377

Post by tills13 »

mikem170 wrote: post #367
tills13 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions he gets his coffee from a local food kitchen. > And don't forget about all the rich people that your tax monies subsidize This is What-about-ism. I can be upset about both.

Point taken on what-about-ism. I find that I do that perhaps too often. But these connections keep jumping into my mind. I wonder if people get mad about one thing, but not the other. I wonder what the commonalities are, what the differences are. I grant that it can lead to tangents, but I guess I find value in it. For example, in this case, does society cut the mooching rich more slack than the mooching poor? It see…

> does society cut the mooching rich more slack than the mooching poor

I think about this constantly. My parents and grandparents are so concerned about a situation where a single undeserving "poor" person is given support that they'd rather nobody be given that support. Drives me insane, especially considering my grandparents were all too happy to accept government support during the pandemic despite them not needing it (their words).

... I wouldn't consider it an opinion when I say that food kitchens are for the needy. This guy is not needy, he's want-y, maybe, or greedy. The needy are in situations they cannot or otherwise struggle to control. This guy is actively avoiding "fixing" his situation to a point where he is no longer in need of these services.

The situation on the West Coast here is pretty bad. The homeless population is quite large and there's very little being done to help them. I can't help but feel it's partially the result of the older population here being apathetic due to the above.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#378

Post by AussieWog93 »

mikem170 wrote: post #371
AussieWog93 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else? I'm not sure if you're Aussie, but please understand that problems like domestic violence and incest/rape still exist in Aboriginal communities to a large extent. There are also an army of "nice" middle class, urban white people performing the most mind-bending mental gymnastics possible…

Ah, I wasn't thinking about any of that stuff. I was thinking of whether small economies could exist without economic coercion backed by violence, where this thread started. The Yanamamo were mentioned as a group that doesn't do that, the men and women carry about their work without the need for coercion. You replied that there's violence against low-status members in Aborigines communities, and wondered if the Yanam…

Apologies for bringing white guilt into it. I misread your comment and reacted.

Regarding the aborigines, the impression I got from the accounts was that these acts of violence were more about dominance than strict economic coercion. I get where you're coming from in that regard.

I would be interested to hear what an anthropologist has to say, but until then it seems like your evidence is stronger.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#379

Post by gruez »

mikem170 wrote: post #271
AussieWog93 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If that happened, who would wash the dishes? I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke. It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a par…

> Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them Is that a bad thing? One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week? Instead we have saddle young adults with student loads, the cost of housing has been inflated by greedy inve…

>One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week?

Easy, look at US's GDP ($68k) and compare it against a country that's proportionately lower (to 15 hours). That gets you around $25k, around the GDP of Bulgaria and Chile.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#380

Post by markzzerella »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #369
markzzerella wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society. When the silent part is said out loud. "We" didn't beat anything, and "we" certainly aren't gods that managed to counter natural law, despite the current zeitgeist that likes to pretend it is so. Humans are predators, and to pretend otherwise will be the folly of our spec…

What a wonderfully Machiavellian and incomplete argument, given the history of societies all the way up to today. You'll go far, kid. Next time though, don't make the classic mistake of talking about the group by talking about individuals in the group. Society is, and this one's confusing if no one taught you this before, not the same as the sum of the behaviour of individuals in that society. They're entirely differ…

Clever condescension, you'll go a long way with intellect like that, kid.

Nice job dropping 'given history' in there, you win! History shows that is a fantastic argument and adds significant value to your post.

Next time, though, try to use that big brain of yours to figure out how to address what I said instead of resorting to reddit level dialog and a straw man.

Did you genuinely believe that I was referring to every individual human? That's an awfully Machiavellian take on what I said.

Unfounded assertion: "redheaded humans aren't real"

Illustration counter to assertion (not an argument): "Of course humans have red hair, just google 'natural redhead'"

Society is, and this might be confusing if nobody's taught you this before, filled with people with disproportionate amounts of power, whether social, capital, political, corporate, legal, or other. This might be scary to your sensibilities, but predators are attracted to positions of power. I don't think anyone of consequence disagrees with this.

We obviously agree here, because you based your entire straw man on the fact that they don't represent every single human everywhere.

I would however like to understand how you think we beat 'natural law' and the predators with this mythical society when you also think that they are the richest and most powerful in said society.

Society "beat" predators? I think most people who have been victims of systemic or institutional oppression would disagree here. I know every police victim I have worked with sure would.

Or maybe I'm wrong and they are all just misunderstood when they beat, steal, lie, and kill the underclass while they destroy our planet and laugh about it.

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