Life After Money

The article Jack posted brings up some interesting thoughts, and links nicely with the discussion we started in Tertulia on Thursday. In light of that discussion, here is some food for thought:

The article describes how we have commoditized everything that sustains us and everything that makes life worth living, from food to resources to arts and entertainment. When true financial crisis hits (which the article seems to find inevitable), “the reverse process [will] begin in earnest – [removing] things from the realm of goods and services, and [returning] them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing.” The author believes that “people will help each other and real communities will reemerge." But I wonder how realistic that belief is. Will this “gift culture” re-develop? Is it even possible for it to come back? People talk of general communal support during the Depression, but are times too different now? I think Steve’s point that widespread hardship decreases shame, produces a greater sense of communal suffering, and therefore invites more communal sharing is valid, but the situation is quite different here than in was in the 1930s. In this globalized, digitized, privatized, competitive world, have we lost too much of any sense of community for it to rebound in times of need?

At one point, the author states that “anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity.” Anyone who can make their own clothes, provide their own shelter, grow their own food, not only decreases economic growth by refusing to commoditize those services, but also stands a better chance of surviving when economic collapse does hit. But is it moral to hasten that collapse? Do we have any obligation to shopowners, seamstresses, carpenters, or chefs to share our wealth with them through spending money on their services? Perhaps, in the long term, the collapse of a money-based economy and return to a service-exchange economy would be beneficial for people and the earth, but I don’t think the transition would be easy, and it could disproportionately hurt certain populations. The wall-street gurus who make their money trading stocks would (in a money-less world) be left penniless, and with no skills to barter. As would the accountants, the bank clerks, and the IRS staffers. And there is always the question of how a government would run with no money… Of course, the author is not advocating for a purely barter system, but even minor changes in our established system would have drastic results, results that are incredibly difficult to predict across time and society.

It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to imagine how you would stand if money suddenly ceased to exist. How would you provide for yourself? What skills or gifts could you exchange? What social networks can you count on that are not “vehicles for the conversion of life into money”? Allowing your perspective to shift thinking in terms of what you can give, “what can you contribute to a more beautiful world?”

These are intense questions even outside of a monetary conversation, and ones that I think could provoke some interesting changes if people really examined them. Particularly the idea of contributing to a “more beautiful world.” Even in a money based world in which all things are seen only as dollar signs, if everyone chose to do one thing simply because it made a more beautiful world, I doubt we’d be in quite as many of the predicaments we are now.

(Happily, I think our own little EH community actually has a pretty fair shot of making it if money goes poof: Diane can knit us clothes, Drew can sew us tents and sleeping bags, Ryan can cook, I’ll bake, Jack can keep people from stealing our stuff, and Desiree can prospect for oil and coal. We’re set. )