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[W]ould there be a sort of monetary system in an anarchist society? I believe not, since I read many times on this forum that in anarchy everything would be free for everyone; but then what prevents me into becoming an absolute parasite for the society?
The adversarial arguments used most often against the revolutionary case tend to project the following implicit assumptions:
- That all social value is reducible to realtime, one-to-one forms of 'service' labor, as what a *butler* would do. This kind of economic assumption is leveraged to produce the anxiety in others that if even just a *few* people wind up being 'slackers', relative to everyone else, then the entire 'social net' would face a crisis of value, and of value-supply.
What's conveniently *ignored* in this mindset / worldview is that many of our daily conveniences derive from *machinery* and *objects*, the labor for which was performed long ago, while each item used is merely a duplicate along with millions of others, thanks to the use of industrial mass-production techniques. So in this way social value is in *inverse* to the effort performed, since the labor provided for the production of each (duplicate) item is in actuality a *fraction* of its resulting usefulness to the end user. (Consider a mass-produced chair, for example.)
- Another assumption is that all 'services' / value to society can be reduced to rudimentary, butler-like kinds of *activity* -- that all societal transactions are made up of this genre of 'personal-service' kind of work, so that anyone who *doesn't* do this kind of work is then not-contributing value to the larger society.
What's disregarded from this assumption is that 'services' encompasses increasingly-complex types of work, especially those kinds that require extended learning, training, and/or expertise. Perhaps those who are simply 'receiving' rudimentary-type services, as for the execution of their daily routines, are then 'freed' to devote more of their waking hours to more-complex activities that produce different *kinds* of social value. (Anyone in an area of cultural production would fit appropriately here.)
Given a materially-leveraged mass production of basic items and automated services in abundance for everyone, the term 'parasite' could no longer conceivably apply to *anyone*, because, in that context, the existence of even a *large* number / proportion of people just living and not doing anything particularly socially valuable would not even *affect* the availability of options or potentialities for life-directions for everyone else, due to the overwhelming abundance of everything considered 'socially necessary'. (It would only be if someone was wantonly, willfully *destructive*, or if society, for whatever situational reality, decided that more-inclusive efforts were needed, that people could conceivably be socially sanctioned in regards to their activity, or lack thereof.)
I've come to the determination that a post-capitalist social order *would* need the utility and flexibility of a money-like vehicle, but such could *not*, by definition, facilitate commodity-production:
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[If] simple basics like ham and yogurt couldn't be readily produced by the communistic gift economy, and were 'scarce' in relation to actual mass demand, they *would* be considered 'luxury goods' in economic terms, and would be *discretionary* in terms of public consumption.
Such a situation would *encourage* liberated-labor -- such as it would be -- to 'step up' to supply its labor for the production of ham and yogurt, because the scarcity and mass demand would encourage others to put in their own labor to earn labor credits, to provide increasing rates of labor credits to those who would be able to produce the much-demanded ham and yogurt. (Note that the ham and yogurt goods themselves would never be 'bought' or 'sold', because the labor credits are only used in regard to labor-*hours* worked, and *not* for exchangeability with any goods, because that would be commodity production.)
This kind of liberated-production assumes that the means of production have been *liberated* and collectivized, so there wouldn't be any need for any kind of finance or capital-based 'ownership' there.
(See my blog entry.)