I’m hoping this doesn’t start a fight, I’m just curious what the political orientation is of this community. I grew up in a liberal (in the American sense) family, and I identify now as a socialist, though a lot of the liberalism I grew up in has stuck with me, like interest in LGBTQ and women’s rights, environmentalism, etc. Wondering where people here land?
I see. In that case, I think the development of money is inevitable. People will want a standardized token of value that is universally accepted. If there is no state, something like gold or bitcoin will meet that need. Something rare but commoditized and fungible will inevitably become the standard unit of account that represents value, and a free market will mean that goods and services naturally find their own price.
why? this is not how commerce was done for most of human history. to get to a single fungible token, whether it has inherent value (ie a system in which cash is rare and the system itself unstable) or it represents debt (historically more common and stable), we have to presuppose a state whereby one class exerts it’s dominance over another class because both the issuance of currency and the tax must be tightly controlled. but the extant state in our hypothetical is the dictatorship of the proletariat, after class divisions have been erased.
Why does the existence of currency presuppose a state? Let alone one that involves class dominance? People can easily trade precious metals or crypto without the existence of a state, because these things don’t need to be issued in order to represent value.
this is a central topic in Debt so I’m not going to rehash it here. if these topics interest you, strongly recommend you read that book.
Fair enough, thanks.