[Hong Wu]

What if I told you that money is just a giant contract in which people have agreed to value things at certain levels and that it's impossible for strangers to have economic interactions with each other without agreed upon rules of conduct and valuation, which means that a money-free society between strangers is impossible, which means that one of the basic promises of communism (to have an economy that isn't run by money) is not possible.

[SolarCross]

What if I told you that money is just a giant contract in which people have agreed to value things at certain levels and that it's impossible for strangers to have economic interactions with each other without agreed upon rules of conduct and valuation, which means that a money-free society between strangers is impossible, which means that one of the basic promises of communism (to have an economy that isn't run by money) is not possible.

Commies are particularly inconsistent on this, sometimes they say a moneyless society will be the fruit of a post revolutionary society, other times they say of course there will still be money. I guess they don't really have any idea. Although I suppose both situations were true in the USSR because slaves in the gulag system were unpaid of course, but outside the gulag people were paid in (funny) money, albeit the prices were decided unilaterally by the governors rather than through a peer-to-peer negotiation as normally happens in a normal society not governed by crazed sociopaths of the communist kind.

I am not sure money is a "giant contract" although it is often involved as the consideration of a contract. Money is an asset particularly used to facilitate trades, a media of exchange. If people exchange, then money of some sort, will be useful and be used.

Perfect self-sufficiency removes the use and thus the need for money but any degree of specialisation requires exchange because one can only excel at something by neglecting excellence in almost everything else. Consequently any advanced economy (better than stone age tech and larger than an extended family) requires money to enable specialists to exchange all the things they are good at for all the things they are not good at. Ie: the pop musician sells his songs for money so he can buy clothes, coke and automobiles. The engineer sells his expertise with machines to buy food, pop songs and housing stock.

[neopagan]

I can see money as a contract. After all, its value has to be agreed. Since gold, silver, and copper went out of use as money, it has become an illusion, albeit a necessary one. As I understand it, the communists of the old communist era never gave up on money per se. They tried to satisfy the needs of society by centralising ownership of property and the means of production. And what a dismal failure it was. I don't believe "communism" will ever re-emerge. All that is left (no pun intended) is a bunch of posers in Che Guevara T shirts, and a handful of crumbling dictatorships. This last group are the most telling. Communism, or what was called communism was always an imposition by the military. Guns, money, and hierarchies of power. "But you can trust your politburo to do the right thing."

And then we have Bit Coins. You will need great faith in the contract. Excellent for laundering illegal profits though.

[Wellsy]

Perhaps you should go into detail as to what money is and how this specific thing would function in a presumably communist society.

Because as it stands today, it seems to function through exchange value which is a standard on which things can be compared, so I can say that so many oranges is of equal exchange value as X amount of pens or what ever. Because their use value simply isn't comparable, and so a third thing is required to make it so and so a level of abstraction is entailed in which exchange value developed separate from use value.
In a communist society in which one presumably has access to things because things are abundant and productive capacity as are highly developed and socially owned by all, the idea of having to pay someone to access something loses it's function.
One doesn't need to pay one's way through society in the way that one does in a capitalist one in which so much is private property that to access requires payment. If one abolishes markets, money doesn't serve a function as it's existence is founded within market relations. Production would be based on use and satisfying human want. Presumably needs are so easily satisfied that people are freely able to develop a rich individuality, freedom from our needs and means to satisfy our base needs allows us to develop ourselves. Production wouldn't be on an external 'objective' law of the market, but consciously seen as relations between people and not agency of commodities, as commodities would no longer exist.

And perhaps Graeber's point that money arose out of debt and credit where you owe me transformed into you owe me a quantifiable amount. In a communist society, the idea of debt would presumably lose it's place and thus credit. I suspect the consideration of what a moneyless society might look like would entail looking at the history of people to see from whence money arose and what was it's significance.

[One Degree]

I guess it comes down to what a money less society would be. We have almost eliminated physical money and it seems a short step from your bank balance being determined by your work and your bank balance being determined by your need. You may call it bookkeeping instead of money but both will need to keep track of transactions.

[The Immortal Goon]

What if I told you that money is just a giant contract in which people have agreed to value things at certain levels and that it's impossible for strangers to have economic interactions with each other without agreed upon rules of conduct and valuation, which means that a money-free society between strangers is impossible, which means that one of the basic promises of communism (to have an economy that isn't run by money) is not possible.

I'd point out that you need a question mark on that run-on sentence.

Then I'd point out that trade isn't capitalism. For instance, just because there were Assyrian coins doesn't mean that the Assyrians practiced international fiat capitalism.

[Wellsy]

I'm also under the impression that Marx's target isn't money so much which is just the ultimate commodity for which other commodities are exchanged. But that the 'law of value' that I think is said to only exist within markets is disrupted somehow. Because its from this that one is motivated to sell things for the sake of selling them (ie capitalists who use money to invest in order to get more money) as they're not concerned with the use value of things. Whilst for many who require to sell their labour power in order to buy good and pay their rent and so forth, basically to survive only work out of deprivation of a communal property in order to acquire things for their use value.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/law-of-value-4-value/

The last thing we should note is that this concept of value is historically specific. Unlike bourgeois economic theory which projects its categories of utility and capital back in time to make all of history retroactively bend to the laws of capitalism, Marx’s theory of value describes a specific type of social organization unique to a society in which the dominant form of production is production for market exchange. When we don’t produce directly for use, but for exchange, we find that our productive activity is regulated by unconscious economic laws which Marx calls the “law of value”. Whereas before we said there was an antagonism between use-value and exchange-value we can now say that this is really an antagonism between use-value and value (since exchange value is an expression of value). As long as production is production to produce values instead of uses we will have to deal with the social antagonisms that spring from this contradiction: The logic of profit will dominate over society rather than the logic of usefulness. And the nature of work will be to maximize profit at all cost rather than to maximize the quality of the experience of work or of the life of the worker.

See this summary for example in which the focus is on the existence of 'law of value' within society or not.
https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/alternatives-to-capital/what-must-be-changed-in-order-to-transcend-capitalism.html

Spoiler: show

Not Another “Labor Money” Scheme: Marx’s Lower Phase of Communism
Marx continually castigated Proudhonist and other proposals for monetary and distributional reform. Yet his Critique of the Gotha Program projects a lower phase of communism whose central feature appears to be yet another “labor money” scheme. Marx seems to be a middle-aged man throwing in the towel after having come up empty. He seems to be repeating the very proposal–focused on changing commodity relations in the sphere of exchange without changing relations of production–that he had repeatedly denounced when it was made by others. I do not think this is so, however. They were trying to institute equal exchange in a society dominated by the law of value, while Marx was theorizing a society in which that law has been abolished.

One of Marx’s clearest formulations of why this difference is all-important occurs in his book Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. He there discusses John Gray’s proposal: a national bank would accept and store stocks of the country’s commodities and, in return, issue certificates denominated in labor-time. A certificate that you did one day’s labor would entitle you to withdraw from the bank any commodities that took one day of labor to produce.

Gray made this proposal in 1831. Similar labor money proposals persist to this day, of course, and there are some actual “alternative currency schemes” like Ithaca Dollars and Brixton pounds.

If one thinks, as Marx did, that “labour-time is the intrinsic measure of value,” then it would seem that labor is in fact a natural alternative to money, a natural standard of value. As he wrote in his critique of Gray, “[W]hy use another extraneous standard as well?” Yet for Marx, this was a serious question that demanded an answer. But instead of answering it, Marx said, Gray “assumed that commodities could be directly compared with one another as products of social labour.” This is because he also assumed that “the labour-time contained in commodities is immediately social [or directly social] labour-time.”

If that were indeed the case, Marx replied, “it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as gold, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price; but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity, and thus the very basis of bourgeois production would be abolished.” But that isn’t what Gray had in mind. He had in mind a system in which “goods are … produced as commodities but not exchanged as commodities.”

Marx argues that commodity production without commodity exchange is unviable; if you have commodity production, commodity exchange is unavoidable. “On the basis of commodity production, labour becomes social labour only as a result of the universal alienation of individual kinds of labour.” An hour of one’s work doesn’t directly “count” as an hour, but as more or less than an hour, or perhaps it doesn’t “count” as labor at all, because it isn’t directly social labor. And two commodities that took the same amount of time to produce can and do have different values (not only different prices). The amounts that the different commodities are actually worth, how much “social” labor they represent, is determined in the market.
For instance, if you work for 40 hours to produce a typewriter, tough noogies. There’s no market for it, so your 40 hours of labor are not “social” labor. If a Stakhanovite can dig three times as much coal as you can in an hour, then Russian for tough noogies. His hour of “individual” labor counts as three times as much “social” labor as yours. If you work hard and well, but you’re farming in China or India, where agricultural output per worker is less than 1 percent of the U.S. level-then Cantonese or Hindi for tough noogies.
But why can’t the state-run bank just declare that an actual hour of individual labor will count directly as an hour of social labor? And why can’t all commodities that took the same amount of labor to produce be declared equal? In other words, why can’t every commodity immediately count as money, or substitute for money? Marx’s answer was simple: “The dogma that a commodity is immediately money or that the particular labour of a private individual contained in it is immediately social labour, does not … become true because a bank believes in it and conducts its operations [accordingly]. On the contrary, bankruptcy would in such a case fulfill the function of practical criticism.”

Marx does not explain what he means by this, but some of the factors that would result in the bankruptcy of the state-run bank are fairly obvious:
1. The more advanced producers would create a black market unless the threat or actuality of state violence prevented them, and so the bank would be continually short of goods, including raw materials and machines. The backward, state-regulated sector would become ever-more backward.
2. If the black market were thwarted, the more advanced producers would leave the country and take their capital with them, unless they were prevented by violence or its threat.
3. If forced to remain inside the country, they might well produce as little as possible. They could get away with this, unless compelled to work hard at gunpoint, because the bank would have to recognize that an hour of their now less-productive work is equal to an hour of every else’s.
4. The system would create a disincentive to work, unless people were compelled to work hard at gunpoint, since the results of an hour’s work would no longer matter.
5. It would also lead to a serious inefficiencies and a decline in useful production. One reason this would occur is that all products of an hour’s labor would count equally, even if they were not wanted or needed. Another is that the more advanced producers would be less well rewarded and thus invest less in new production.

Marx concludes his critique of Gray by arguing that “labor money is a pseudo-economic term, which denotes the pious wish to get rid of money, and together with money to get rid of exchange-value, and with exchange-value to get rid of commodities, and with commodities to get rid of the bourgeois mode of production.” In other words, to do what those who advocate labor money really want done, one must go “all the way down,” and get rid not only of money, but also get rid of the whole system of value production.

...

When Marx turns to the first phase of communist society, he envisions a sweeping revolutionary transformation of the relations of production, from the very start:

First, “individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion,” as in capitalist society, “but directly as a component part of total labor.” Thus the individual’s contribution to society is no longer assessed in terms of the number of products she produces or their value. Thus Marx notes, “the labor employed on the products [does not] appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them.” What the producer contributes to society is now, as he goes on to say, her “individual quantum of labor”–the actual amount of work she does.

Another consequence of the direct sociality of labor is that “the producers do not exchange their products.” He doesn’t mean that each individual will be self-sufficient, but that you won’t have to pay prices in order to get things, nor sell things or your own ability to work in order to buy things. The reason why there will be no exchange of products is not that it will be outlawed, but that the direct sociality of labor makes it unnecessary. Each individual’s work is a direct contribution to the society’s production. Thus the result of production, the product, is directly social as well. It doesn’t have to be valuable in the market, since there is no longer value.

Because the mode of production determines the mode of distribution, new relations of distribution arise on the basis of these new relations of production. “Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society-after the deductions [for social consumption and investment] have been made-exactly what [he] gives to it … The same amount of labor which [an individual] has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.” If you work for an hour, you’re entitled to the product of an hour of other people’s work. There’s an exchange, but it is directly an exchange of labor. The products don’t exchange.

What makes all this possible? Marx’s answer is extremely important. He says that the principle of equality and the actual social practice “are no longer at loggerheads.” In bourgeois society, all people are equal as a matter of principle, and equal values exchange in the market. But profound inequality is rampant nonetheless. So “principle and practice are … at loggerheads.”

Why isn’t this so in the new society? It’s not a matter of putting one’s labor money where one’s labor mouth is, being honest and pure, or being selfless instead of selfish. Instead, what’s involved is that the changed social conditions have eliminated the contradiction in existing society that compels principle and practice to be at loggerheads. The contradiction is this: “the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.”

It is this law of value that exists within capitalism that is difficult to theorize how it is practically disrupted and overturned.

[Rugoz]

"bourgeois economic theory" (i.e. neoclassical theory*) does differentiate between "exchange value" and "use value" (utility). You won't find any economist arguing that maximizing "exchange value" (e.g. GDP) maximizes utility.

As for the "labor theory of value", I don't have a fundamental problem with it. But it's obviously wrong if you factor in natural resources, though probably not by much in an industrialized economy, and it only holds in a hypothetical long-run equilibrium. It's just not particularly useful.

* Why is neoclassical theory "bourgeois" and classical theory not?

[B0ycey]

I wouldn't say money is a contract. Technically it is an IOU. However I would say it is a great medium between exchanging goods. Without money you would have to trade in materials. Fine if the exchange is mutual but not if someone doesn't want what you have.

I can see why people don't like the capitalist system, but there is no other system that could ever be better and functional. Even Romans traded in coin. Without doing the relevant research now, my guess is that past civilizations that had adapted money in their society are MUCH bigger than those without.

[Wellsy]

"bourgeois economic theory" (i.e. neoclassical theory*) does differentiate between "exchange value" and "use value" (utility). You won't find any economist arguing that maximizing "exchange value" (e.g. GDP) maximizes utility.

As for the "labor theory of value", I don't have a fundamental problem with it. But it's obviously wrong if you factor in natural resources, though probably not by much in an industrialized economy, and it only holds in a hypothetical long-run equilibrium. It's just not particularly useful.

* Why is neoclassical theory "bourgeois" and classical theory not?

I'm not sure such a point of them being aware of a differentiation really hits at the mark of how exchange value dominates use value as conceived in Marxian economics and not utility as conceived in Marginal Utility Theory.

Spoiler: show

UTILITY
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginalutility.asp

Marginal utility is the additional satisfaction a consumer gains from consuming one more unit of a good or service.

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/u/t.htm#utility

A quantity reflecting the subjective value someone attaches to a commodity reflected in how much they are willing to pay for it. As a component part of the theory of marginal utility, utility became the foundation concept of modern economics.

John Stuart Mill developed the concept of utility which brought under a single quantitative concept the range of things – beauty, scarcity, usefulness – which may underlie the demand for a commodity. Mill’s concept of utility differed from “use-value” because utility is quantitative and is commensurable with exchange-value. Thus according to Mill someone would buy something if its utility (for him) was greater than its price.

Use-Value
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/u/s.htm

Use-value is the qualitative aspect of value, i.e., the concrete way in which a thing meets human needs:

“The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use-value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange-value.” [Capital, Chapter 1]

https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/marxism/terms/usevalue.html

The usefulness of a commodity vs. the exchange equivalent by which the commodity is compared to other objects on the market. Marx distinguishes between the use-value and the exchange value of the commodity. Use-value is inextricably tied to "the physical properties of the commodity" (126); that is, the material uses to which the object can actually be put, the human needs it fulfills.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/law-of-value-4-value/

A commodity has a use. This is its use-value. What does use-value tell us? It tells us how a commodity satisfies a social need. If we want to feed everybody we need a certain quantity of food. If we want to build everyone a house we need a certain quantity of wood and nails. Some use-values require no effort to attain: air, sun, gravity, etc. Others require effort to attain. There is a finite limit to the amount of labor that can be devoted to the production of use-values. Society must apportion this labor between the production of different use-values in some way. As technology changes the amount of labor required to produce some use-values decreases thus signaling a change in the apportioning of labor. As technology evolves to reshape what human labor is capable of producing so do our needs and desires evolve.

I imagine the difference comes from Marginal Utility Theory's emphasis on the subjects perception which, whilst not entirely insignificant, doesn't seem to be the focus of Marx's analysis when he's trying to determine a value that exists irrespective of subject's personal preference for the object.

Marx seems quite critical of how properties of things and their relations are abstracted away and reduced to their 'utility'.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf

Marx's criticisms of Utilitarianism are twofold. On the one hand, he charges that Utilitarianism is incapable of accommodating human individuality in all its concrete aspects, instead grasping the human only in one narrow aspect: as a source or beneficiary of utility.
...
The core of Bentham's Utilitarian theory is what has come to be known as the “Greatest Happiness Principle,” the doctrine that a moral action is good or bad according to the extent to which it maximizes utility, bringing about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people78. According to Marx, Utilitarianism obliterates the unique aspects of different products and different relations between people and reduces them to one thing: utility, or “usefulness”. Utilitarianism, he argues, is tailor-made for a society based on capitalist exchange, in which the particularity of specific products and of the needs of specific persons is dissolved into one mode of expression, that of money. Marx writes:

The apparent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation. […] In Helvétius and Holbach one can already find an idealisation of this doctrine, which fully corresponds to the attitude of opposition adopted by the French bourgeoisie before the revolution. Holbach depicts the entire activity of individuals in their mutual intercourse, e. g., speech, love, etc., as a relation of utility and utilisation. Hence the actual relations that are presupposed here are speech, love, definite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals. Now these relations are supposed not to have the meaning peculiar to them but to be the expression and manifestation of some third relation attributed to them, the relation of utility or utilisation. This paraphrasing ceases to be meaningless and arbitrary only when these relations have validity for the individual not on their own account, not as spontaneous activity, but rather as disguises, though by no means disguises of the category of Utilisation, but of an actual third aim and relation which is called the relation of utility. (The German Ideology, MECW 5:409)

And I wonder how this in fact relates to the sort of rationalization expressed by Weber. It speaks to the sentiment of how an education for many is valued only to the extent that it is perceived to help increase your annual income. Because the utility in Marginal Utility Theory seems to be based on a sense that it can be quantified in the form of how much money someone is willing to pay for something as an expression of their subjective preference or something.

And I don't think the Labour Theory of Value necessitates dismissing the value produced by nature itself.
http://www.marxist.com/in-defence-of-ltv.htm

One should add that labour is not the only source of material wealth. We also receive the proceeds of nature as a free gift, which also contributes to the wealth of society. An early English economist, William Petty, correctly observed that labour is the father of wealth and the earth its mother. It is a statement that Marx quotes in Capital.
...
“That labour is the sole source of wealth,” wrote the economist John Cazenove in 1812, “seems to be a doctrine as dangerous as it is false, as it unhappily affords a handle to those who would represent all property as belonging to the working classes, and the share which is received by others as a robbery or fraud upon them.”

We can forgive Cazenove’s indiscretion about labour being the sole source of wealth, which is false. In fact, there are forms of wealth which are supplied by nature alone, and which contains no labour whatsoever. This includes, for example, virgin forests and natural rivers. Marx explained this in Volume One of Capital. Nature and labour both play their part in the production of wealth. We should not, however, confuse wealth (which is composed of use-vaues) with value, which is completely different, as we shall see.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S3a2a

A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)[12] Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

[anasawad]

Money-less system can function in a post-scarcity, mass automation, mass production and highly interconnected, nationalistic, and educated society.

[SolarCross]

Money-less system can function in a post-scarcity, mass automation, mass production and highly interconnected, nationalistic, and educated society.

Arguably the west (or indeed far-east countries like japan and south korea) fits that description more than any other society past or present yet money is as ever present as ever. So I guess you pulled that little fantasy out of your arse?

[anasawad]

@SolarCross
Does any country in the world currently live in a post scarcity world ? No, not a single one. The technology for it doesn't exist yet nor about to anytime soon.

Does any country have full mass automation, that is production and even service in general are entirely automated and in such case work would be either in science, engineering, arts,etc and such fields (i.e intellectual jobs) ? No, not a single country on earth has that yet, nor any is on its way to do so.

Does any country in the world have mass production in all fields to an extent that its economy is a self containing system on its own ?
No, no country is even close to it not even China, and difinitly not any western country since western nations are actually losing all their industries gradually thus production is decreasing.

Did any country so far in the world reached a stage of internal Interconnectedness and interdependence that any bad or good event in the life of any of its citizens will affect everyone and the nation as whole to whatever degree that is ? No, infact its going quite the opposite. You can look at the biggest economies in the world to see thats no where near being true. Thats called economic and financial inequality if you haven't gotten it so far, and its growing significantly every year all around the world in all countries.

Is there any society currently in the world that all or atleast an overwhelming majority of its members are nationalistic to a degree where they care about each and every other member and element of their nation and are protective over it ?
No, again, cant be farther from it.

And finally, is there a society that we can look at today and say its a highly educated and informed society ? No. Again, cant be further from the truth. Its sufficient to look at all the stupidity, bullshit, falsehoods, and partisanship spread all over the world to see that we're not only no where near having any highly educated societies, but rather even moving further away from it.



To have a communist nation, in its originally intended form not what many ignorant people around keep thinking it is, you'd need to have all of the above. Thats why communism is generally considered to be the final form of political and economic order in any civilization once it reaches a certain level of technological and scientific advancement in a post scarcity world. And when we reach that stage, money simply becomes useless and meaningless, because there would be infinite resources, production and goods.
And with the interconnectedness and nationalism and education (this is generally also ideological) achieved fully, equality will be achieved due to everyone having access to pretty much everything.
In such society, the only thing distincting people would be there intellectual achievements and pursuits.
Even the "stateless" political structure where the decision making is made directly by all the people in the nation as a collective deciding body instead of simply electing representative body to decide can only be realized in technologically highly advanced and highly educated and informed nation.


The other possible but highly unlikely system ofcourse is basically going back to god-kings with absolute power and authority because technology would allow it even more efficiently than before.



Thats why i generally think its not about time for communism just yet. Communism simply cant work efficiently at the current stage of the world. Even states that are ran by communist parties are socialist states not communist states in reality, a communist state if we were to look at the actual meaning of one, hasn't been achieved yet; the conditions are just not right yet.
To be able to reach a level where a communist state not only can be achieved but would be the only viable option to build, we need technocratic states and systems to push civilization or atleast the intended nation to the next stage in regard of science and technology.

[Oxymandias]

@anasawad

I think what you are discussing is Technocracy:

http://technocracy.ca/tiki-index.php?page=Begin

Technocracy is a proposal for a steady-state, post-scarcity economic system. It is intended for industrialized nations with sufficient natural, technological, and human resources to produce an economic abundance. Primarily this refers to the continent of North America, but may also apply to other areas today as well if they have achieved certain minimum criteria.

I think you'll find the bolded text quite interesting.

[anasawad]

@Oxymandias
Communism does share alot with technocracy, the only difference is that communism is all encompassing when it comes to different corners of the system.
It can be argued (and it is) that technocracy is derived from communism through the revising of some communist principles.

In general, any real analysis of the topic will show that communism can only function to the maximum efficiency once those elements are achieved. And to achieve them you do indeed need technocracy.

It (technocracy) however would fail to sustain a nation once those elements are achieved.

[Oxymandias]

@anasawad

Technocracy Inc. was not aware of the Communist Manifesto by the time they made Technocracy. The Communist Manifesto didn't get serious attention until the 1930s when the Great Depression hit and everyone was looking for a solution. Technocracy was made in the mid-1920s. The Communist Manifesto doesn't specify a plan in contrast with Technocracy. That was for Communists themselves to find out. However the end result they both strive for is the same.

Technocracy (at least the one I am talking about) requires a resource abundance to function. All those things you stated are necessary for communism to exist are also required of Technocracy, at least only the resource abundance part. However technocracy as a political system is preferred to achieve Technocracy/Communism.

[anasawad]

@Oxymandias
Not entirely, communism really started in the 19th century so it was to some extent well known. However it only launched as a political system in the 20th century.

For the end result, they do both seek the same thing that is why its easy to mix them together. The difference really is the social and political structures they produce, as the economic one is essentially the same.
Technocracy is indeed needed to achieve the conditions a communist state requires to be established on.
It is however necessary the technocracy does not continue once these conditions are achieved as it would inevitably allow a given entity, body of people or even a single person to acquire absolute authority under these conditions.

[SolarCross]

@anasawad
Ok so you did pull it out of your arse.

- Post scarcity, can't mean scarcity of anything as that will NEVER happen. It has to mean scarcity of basic necessities, which is chiefly food and water. People really don't need anything else, everything else is luxury. A post scarcity society is one where starvation practically never happens. The West has been post-scarcity since the 1900s at least, with odd exceptions during the upheavels of world wars.

- mass automation, isn't a binary either you have it or you don't, but most things are already made in factories utilising high degrees of automatic processes. There is obviously room for more automation, but in the west and especially far east "lights out" production is already here.

- interconnectedness. I interpreted that to mean communication technology density but it seems you had a more mystical idea of that word. The west and east have extemely dense and pervasive communication activity, internet, motorways, rail networks, air routes, postal networks. I can buy a widget from Hong Kong over the internet and have it delivered to me in the UK within a week. That's some pretty dense interconnectedness taking the historical perspective.

- nationalistic. This tends to come out more in times of war and strife which for the west and east hasn't been for some time. Clearly people were more nationalistic during the World Wars than today. That might be taken as "good" thing though.

- educated. Taking a historical perpective the education levels anywhere in the west is huge. If anything there may be an over-production of educated people.

All this is by-the-by as you have not given any causal reason why any of the these qualities would incentivise abandoning money.

For example: if anything educated people want more money than uneducated people. Your stone age hunter gatherer can get by just fine without money because he can provide all his needs himself just by running around after wild animals with his pointy stick.

An aerospace engineer specialising in aerodynamic analysis on the other hand wants bucket loads of money because to the extent he is an expert in aerodynamic analysis is proportional to the extent he wants other people to satisfy the million needs he has that he can't or doesn't wish to satisfy himself, to do that he has to pay them.

[anasawad]

@SolarCross

Ok so you did pull it out of your arse.

Or you're thinking out of your ass ?

- Post scarcity, can't mean scarcity of anything as that will NEVER happen. It has to mean scarcity of basic necessities, which is chiefly food and water. People really don't need anything else, everything else is luxury. A post scarcity society is one where starvation pratically never happens. The West has been post-scarcity since the 1900s at least, with odd exceptions during the upheavels of world wars.

Actually it can happen, we're heading towards an age of space exploration and colonization, so access to amounts of resources more than we could ever use. And we have this little thing called fusion technology in development which would make sure we have all types of resources we need.

A post scarcity world is one where we never run out of basic materials. Basic material include minerals.

For the west, the west still has 100s of thousands and millions of homeless people. You're anything BUT a post scarcity economy.

- mass automation, isn't a binary either you have it or you don't, but most things are already made in factories utilising high degrees of automatic processes. There is obviously room for more automation, but in the west and especially far east "lights out" production is already here.

Automation so far is in basic and intermediate production processes, and doesn't cover all of them nor does it cover the service sector.
An economy with full mass automation doesn't have a thing called Blue collar workers. Everyone still has those thus no one is at that stage yet.

- interconnectedness. I interpreted that to mean communication technology density but it seems you had a more mystical idea of that word. The west and east have extemely dense and pervasive communication activity, internet, motorways, rail networks, air routes, postal networks. I can buy a widget from Hong Kong over the internet and have it delivered to me within a week. That's some pretty dense interconnectedness taking the historical perspective.

I thought i explained it very well and in simple form but 'll try again since you obviously didn't understand it.
A society that has billionares and homeless people living in it is not a highly interconnected society because there is still a large gap between its members. The more interconnected the society, and thus the social structure is; the smaller this gap is. That is, what ever happens in society will always inevitably affect everyone in it, and thus justice and fairness can be guaranteed because the lack of them would inflect severe damage on the given society.
Basically, as i said earlier, a society that is internally highly interconnected and interdependent.

- nationalistic. This tends to come out more in times of war and strife which for the west and east hasn't been for some time. Clearly people were more nationalistic during the World Wars than today. That might be taken as "good" thing though.

Nationalistic doesn't necessarily mean militaristic. I already explained it.

nationalistic to a degree where they care about each and every other member and element of their nation and are protective over it

- educated. Taking a historical perpective the education levels anywhere in the west is huge. If anything there may be an over-production of educated people.

So obvious and notable by the surplus of idiots roaming all over the west. And by the constant decline of skilled labor and educational systems all over the western world; that you need to import skilled labor and experts from else where.
Seriously, get over yourself. All anyone need is to take a look at the local news of any western country today to see the decline of intelligence and growing lack of educated and informed people.

All this is by-the-by as you have not given any causal reason why any of the these qualities would incentivise abandoning money.

Because it would be meaningless. Thats the point of post-scarcity economies. For fucks sake even sci-fi writers realize that at one point in the future, abundance will make money meaningless.

If anyting educated people want more money than uneducated people for example

No, educated people want more money to get more things. Money is used to facilitate the exchange of goods and thus you need more money to get more goods. If there is an over supply of a certain type of goods, the price goes down. If there was an infinite supply of a certain type of goods, the prices will drop to zero. So if you have access to infinite resources (infinite here doesn't mean you'll have the entire universe, but rather more resources than you could ever possibly use), and with a highly if not fully automated processing, production and delivery system in place. That means there will be an infinite supply of goods in all fields, thus money becomes meaningless due to the massive surplus in supply.

We will inevitably reach this stage, and not in the far distant future, but literally under current rates of scientific and technological advancement. Human civilization would likely reach that stage by the end of this century.

Further progress happens because;

In such society, the only thing distincting people would be there intellectual achievements and pursuits.

We already are moving towards such state of affairs and all the technologies needed are being developed as we speak. Along side with all other conditions needed being pursued in mutliple places.
Except perhaps in some western countries where the policy seems to be to maintain the population as dumb and unaware as possible so the ruling elites can maintain power without any trouble.

[MistyTiger]

@Hong Wu You forgot a question mark and the OP looks like a run-on sentence.

Money is like a way to set a value on stuff, a way to categorize things in life. If it was a contract, we would need a lawyer every time inflation happened because the contract would be breached at each price increase. Then there would be even more lawsuits in the world.