Your verbose tear down of my use of “ability” seemed like an attack on the concept itself, especially when you combined it with attacking the concept itself. That’s also not where you started.

I do think money is the problem. Maybe love of money is more pressing at this time, but if we don’t keep the goal of eliminating money in mind, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere substantially different from where we’re at. But I’m willing to agree to disagree on that point for the time being.

I did not flood the dialog, I made no call to action, and I would’ve preferred critical analysis of the problems of money over talking about tense. If you want to have debates instead of arguments, I suggest examining your approach.

That’s a big stretch for a fucking tense. And when correcting is necessary, it should be done in such a way that actually strengthens the foundation of the point, assuming you agree with the goal. Otherwise what you’re trying to build will never come to fruition.

And above all jump down the throat of anyone who doesn’t enunciate a point perfectly, it should be our goal to discourage engagement as much as possible /s

I find it extremely ironic that someone who seems to have such strong opinions on communication is so bad at. You bring up not awful and not unheard of points about using conservative language to draw people to the left. That could’ve been a much more productive discussion.

The biggest reason I never told you what my plan was is because you never asked for it. The initial point I was making was about how money is bad and we don’t need it. Then you attacked my phrasing. You could’ve even briefly corrected my phrasing and then gone on to talk or ask about what the path to get there is. Instead you ranted about what tense I was using and how other economic systems don’t work.

The way you’ve communicated with me makes it seem like your goal is alienating people.

If you’re asking what I think the best way forward is, please just ask that from the beginning. My answer might’ve been that I’ve been working with the PSL and think they have a pretty good idea of a socialist America. Instead we’re bickering over the definition of “ability”.

Otherwise, you’re just arguing for the status quo that everyone hates.

We have to agree “money bad” before making a plan to move beyond it.

My talking about about the Incas and different non-monetary systems isn’t me trying to make a plan, it’s trying to show the possibility of the concept.

We’re never going to pull off a revolution without numbers. And only giving air to the “practical detail oriented” people while name calling the rest is a great way to make sure you never get those numbers.

And yes, there is a plan that I did mention, socialism. But that’s not how you phrased your initial engagement with my comment.

You are well beyond “most basic”, and also I disagree. Over-attention to detail is a very easy way to make nothing happen at all, which is currently killing people. I’m not the person who’s going to map out a detailed plan to get to that society, nor do I think an internet comment section is the place to do that. Especially when what we’re talking about is global revolution which absolutely necessitates broad engagement with many many people who don’t know all the details and really don’t need to. This is a very appropriate context to be talking in broad strokes. And if you want to wait for some perfect plan with every detail in exactly the right place, you’ll be waiting until the heat death of the universe.

You claim to want the same outcomes as me, but your method of naysaying and picking at every detail will mostly lead to people disengaging with the conversation entirely. That’s actively harmful to the movement’s progress.

We have to decide we want to do it before we can figure out how to do it. If we allow the current trend to continue, we’ll never get the opportunity to try out any of those alternatives. There is a definitive plan to live in a stateless classless moneyless society, it’s called socialism. It has an express goal of moving beyond a moneyed system. Focusing on how long and complicated the path could be is a great way to keep people disinterested in making any change whatsoever. I’m not saying you need to hide that part of it, but the way to inspire change is by keeping focus on what the goal is, and making it seem like it’s possible because it is.

Also it’s very easy to just say “____ is extremely vulnerable to corruption” to dismiss the whole idea, but you’re also just doing the same generalization I did but in a negative direction. Well money is extremely vulnerable to corruption and we have more evidence of that than most any other system.

Again, context matters. If someone reads an internet comment that says “humans have the ability to fly” and proceeds to jump off a building, that’s on them. Doesn’t change the veracity of the statement. If you would like to question how the statement was true, hopefully the commenter would be willing to elaborate with some examples (like how I sent you a list of economic theories that don’t involve money). The people who thought that humans could fly went to work inventing things to make it true. The people who didn’t think that were eventually proven wrong.

Also again, a full economic theory is way too complicated to get into the details in this context. I can say that my favorite theory is a library economy, but I would rather those logistics be discussed in a time and place with people that were positioned to make it happen.

But yes, I do believe that money is the biggest problem. I think it leads to more corruption than most other frameworks for resource allocation.

Wasn’t the point that nobody would want to mine? But Inca did mine silver copper and clay? Also they built aqueducts and pyramids which I’m sure were plenty back breaking. More importantly.

Not just America. There’s a global rightward shift largely fueled by moneyed interests. In the countries you mentioned, the rich are still getting richer and wealth inequality is growing. The wealthy countries all got that way because of colonialist oppression. We live under a global capitalist economy that is directly antagonistic to places that try to live apart from it. Cuba is probably the best modern example of an attempt to break from the capitalist hegemony, but they are punished and slandered for it. But they actually have better health outcomes and longer life expectancy than the imperial core of the USA. And yes they still use money because they live in a world that requires the use of money. That’s not saying moneyless society isn’t possible, but demonstrates the stranglehold money has over the world.

Yes, power hungry people will always be around, but the money system only feeds into that desire. Capitalism rewards and encourages greed. How are we supposed to keep the power hungry in check when the system is designed for them to flourish? I’d rather see a system that encourages collaboration. A system where reducing your working hours gives you opportunity rather than panic. I don’t think that’s possible with a system that revolves around money.

I would again point to the Incas as a decent example. Though I kind of want to pick at your use of “money or authoritarian forces”.

Money is currently used as an authoritarian force. It’s given those with money restrictive control over our daily lives. Look at all the censorship by those who control the major websites and payment processors on the internet. Look at the who lobbied the creation of infrastructure that forces most every person in the states to own and maintain a car. Look at how they’re working on dismantling our public education system. Our police and military exist to protect those with money. This is how capitalism works. Despite some lofty ideas of peace liberty and democracy for all, when the system is based around money everything else will get compromised.

Words are how we communicate ideas, and words are messy and can mean different things in different cultures and contexts (and a lot of times people use them incorrectly). Semantics matter in science and academia when you’re trying to be precise for the historical record so things don’t get misinterpreted by people who usually don’t have the ability to ask you what you mean by “has the ability” or “humanity”. A very broad statement I might add. Too broad of a statement for most academic literature.

An early step in the process of ending our reliance on money is broadly accepting that it isn’t a necessity. I never claimed that that kind of global shift would happen overnight, and I don’t find it useful to use that kind of prescription to undermine the concept unless your goal is solely to undermine the concept.

I disagree with a few points you bring up, but beyond those, it sounds like your biggest problem with my statement is in the semantics. I don’t find that to be very useful when obviously the logistics of such a system are complicated enough to warrant a whole doctorate degree. Comments on social media between strangers with no verifiable education isn’t really the place to harp on precise wording and definitions. I think it’s possible for humanity to coordinate without money. Is that better? Or do you still disagree?

Not that huge of a claim, especially when now is so chaotic and dysfunctional. Here’s a nonexhaustive list of moneyless economies (obviously with varying degrees of feasibility)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monetary_economy

~edit: wording~

While you’re correct that there are no examples of such a society*, that isn’t because money is crucial to development. It’s because the time of technological breakthroughs happened in a global capitalist economy. Just because that’s the way history played out doesn’t mean that was the only way it could’ve. Money didn’t invent those things, people did. They had the time and resources to make that stuff happen. And yes, they got those resources via a moneyed economy, but that doesn’t mean those same people couldn’t have gotten the same time and resources had they existed within say a library economy.

Taking money out of the picture would also take bills out of the picture. And humanity absolutely has the ability to coordinate action without money at least as well (if not better) than how it is now, the only difference is it would be harder for individuals to be the sole coordinator. Money, and who has it, is our current central organizer and will continue to burn the planet if we fail to take away its power.

If we decide money no longer matters it’d be petty easy to eliminate them all. If we continue to let money run our lives then it’ll continue to be pretty easy for the people with money to keep all their power.

Lol to telling someone who’s playing acoustic that a clean tone is boring

I’d love to have a music theory comm. Like discussing some passages and analyzing things beyond the basics