ethel on consumption and exchange
from ethel mannin’s bread and roses:
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VII. CONSUMPTION AND EXCHANGE IN UTOPIA
ethel on consumption and exchange
marsh exchange law.. graeber exchange law.. exchange
In his Utopia More had every city divided into four, with a market-place in the middle of each where the goods produced were sorted and distributed to the appropriate store-houses, ‘and thither every father goes and takes whatsoever he or his family stand in need of, without either paying for it, or leaving anything in exchange’. There is no reason for giving a denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among them; and there is no danger of a man’s asking for more than he needs; they have no inducements to do this, since they are sure that they shall always be supplied
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To the Utopians it is obvious that money is a sham; that the only real wealth is the land and what it, directly or indirectly, produces. It seems to the younger ones, who have grown up in the ideal commonwealth, droll that there was ever a time when wealth was thought of in terms of money, and that money was not silver or gold but mere paper, and that in a world of plenty people starved and went homeless and in rags because they had not sufficient of these pieces of paper to procure the necessities of life.
‘Were the people all mad?’ they demand, and it is difficult for them to grasp that what seems to them a tremendous game of make-believe was taken seriously as ‘the economic system’..t The older Utopians remember the passing of the money system during the transitional period of change-over from the old order to the new. First of all food was distributed free, and when people got used to this innovation and ceased to think it extraordinary, more and more things — both goods and services — were gradually made available without the exchange of money. All travel was made free, and of course all education and medical services, and then more and more goods, after food, clothes, and so on, till the people got used to doing without money, and there ceased to be any use for it at all..t
today we have a means to hasten that process/detox..
ie: any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do as the planned obsolescence .. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
their price is only kept up by giving them a false scarcity value. .
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These people starved and were homeless and went in rags not because there was not enough food or clothing or shelter to go round, but simply because they had no tokens to exchange for these things, and they lacked these tokens because they lacked work.
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There is no buying and selling. Everything — food, houses, clothes, entertainment, public services, transport, books, furniture, education — is completely free. There is no barter. No compulsion to work. No wages.
a sabbatical ish transition ness.. whatever for a year
‘Won’t it make everything very complicated?’
On the contrary, it simplifies everything. Nothing could be more complicated than finance — the stock exchange, the banking system, the credit system, and the labyrinth of accountancy..t
mannin finance law
graeber violence/quantification law et al
Robert Mennell, himself a business-man, declares, ‘More than half the worry and effort of any business is connected with the cash and price problems, buying and selling, costing, charging, checking and collecting the money..t The choice and assembling of the most suitable materials and personnel, the calculating of weights and measures, strains and stresses, these would be simplified out of recognition if price considerations could be eliminated. … If cash considerations were eliminated, countless thousands of men and women now engaged on money calculations would be set free for useful work for the public good or for the cultivating and beautifying of their own minds and bodies as well as their own houses and gardens ’. He adds that ‘As a result of this release of man-power, production under scientific planning, and with mechanical devices being used to their full capacity, would so vastly exceed our power of consumption that the time available for living as distinct from earning a livelihood, would soon transform the world’.
In Utopia there is no question of *earning a living. Living is not something which should have to be earned; the basic right of all existence is the right to live . To this, in a truly civilised society, should be added the right to live abundantly , l But only in a **moneyless society is man freed from the necessity — and degradation — of having to earn his living.
*earn a living ness
**has to be more than moneyless.. ie: sans any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do
The people who insist that a moneyless society is impractic- able merely assert their lack of faith in humanity.
Money is not wealth. Money produces nothing. When there is a famine money is useless; its falsity is then revealed; it ceases to have reality as wealth. The only real wealth is the land.
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be you. 