• Zoboomafoo@yiffit.net
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    10 months ago

    Barter opens up communal valuations of labor to set a price for a person’s time based on what they can personally contribute.

    Soo… money?

    • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Barter is the model we are given for a non-currency centric society… It is also not how money less societies work. In a general sense the most common purely non-market socialist societies of the past and present (Communism alocates resources and property on a more rigid basis of “need” as artificially determined by an authority ideally (ideal being the operative word) democratic in nature, socialism just holds specific properties or services as common trust and can be split into multiple ideologies based on what should be considered public trust) had more like a running tab where people aren’t really keeping track of how much they are benefiting.

      Like if I come over and ask you for some of the wheat you’re growing you’ll probably say yes because we’re neighbours and I helped you build your house and will give you a share of my apple harvests later on. If all of our group keep supporting each other this way and helping each other out we can get everything we need. People do still notice and socially reject shirkers in these systems but it is more like you recognize their stingy behaviour over a longer period. There are still theives who take things they are not welcome to and there does exist a sense of personal property. Trade straight across for roughly equivalent goods still has a place in these societies but in a limited way for people they don’t see very often or people they have cause not to trust to hold up their end.

      Barter still frames things in money centric (though technically not capitalist) veiw of labour. That it sounds inconvenient is largely the point. It’s vaguely propagandist to give you nothing to imagine but a society obsessed with personal ownership of all property that is individualistic in nature.

      Not to say that the end goal gor socialists is to revert to these systems. Market socialism basically combines capitalist systems into a blended system as most socialists agree that there are advantages to capitalism worth keeping around, just that unchecked it’s a monster that partitions off what should be held in public trust to parties who erode the public good for personal gain that never fully returns to the system.

    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      No. In the example, an electrician is skilled and can provide their skills and experience to your project - but they have a project of their own that they need help with. Unfortunately he wants help converting an old car into an EV, which you don’t have experience in so you become unskilled labor for his task. An hour of skilled labor would be worth several unskilled labor hours, in this example, but that value conversion wouldnbe determined by the local community.

      No money, just being helpful until the project is done.