Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 73. (Read 288375 times)

Well there are 3 different schools to anarchism one strictly socialist one stictly capitalist and one strictly primitvist. I am not strictly bound by any of those.
And primitivism isn't necessarily about abolishing the use of technology.

In one way, yes I find the current network topology of the Internet disgusting. But that will not stop me for using it to my advantage. It should be replaced by mesh networks based on devices you can construct at home. Low orbit relays should replace sealines and landlines in unpoulated areas.

If you would describe that proposal as something else, show me if it can be categorized some way better.

There is no such thing as non-scarcity, even in the short term. The exception might be air, and anyone who lives in LA could tell you that they would prefer if the air were cleaner. Ever water is scarce because there is a limit to transporting it.

The biggest mistake the uninitiated make is to conflate scarcity and shortages. Scarcity can never cease to exist unless every human literally has godlike magic and can conjure anything possible at any given moment to their precise location with a thought. Dirt is scarce because some people need a large amount of it where there is no dirt, and need to take it from somewhere else.

Forums are not tribes in the primitivist sense.
In fact, a primitivist would propably puke when he/she learns how much technology is required to run a forum on the internet.

Bad excuse, man.
Internet is so deep into what primitivists don't want.

We had to go through the industrial revolution, then we switched to an oil economy and built the information age from that.

A tribe as seen from a primitivists point of view is realy a tribe living out there in the bush.
Just some people trying to live together without the use of technological development.
Even better, primitivists would like it to be tribes of hunter-gatherers. So no farming, ok?
No technology whatsoever if possible (but i wonder how they will make clothing for the winter without technology).

So, please, go offline, switch off your computer, get into your bear suit and find a nice piece of land to frollic on and search for berries.

What makes you think there will be enough people wanting to organize themselfs to create a global change?
Why did all the 'small segregated community' experiments fail miserably?
There is no need to punnish these people, they are only hurting themselfs.

I assert that people are different and not everyone will listen.

And a society agreeing with your ideas would not be better off because they would not be able to implement these ideas and make them work.
I mean, the main goal is nice and all, but you absolutely have to throw most of those ideas away because they are not realistic and unachievable from current perspective.
It's not only about the goal, it is also about getting there.

But, you know, it is always nice to dream.

Do we have a good definition of non-scarcity? Obviously it doesn't literally mean non-scarcity. If we knew what the question means, then maybe we could reason about it.

ETA: I think the idea is to perpetually be in movement from scarcity to a post-scarcity state. But I don't see a paradigm shift during that journey. It's scarcity all the way.

So this whole things relies on things not being scarce?

The most pertinent question is how do we get from scarcity to total non-scarcity in a short period of time?

I'm sad you feel about it that way.
Forums usually have a sense of identey which grows independently of the main site. Of course every forum is differnt. and some exibit this behavoir more than others.

FYI I have been on forums since over a decade. If you are new to this you'll notice it after a year or two.

It's subjective in a different sense. For instance breathable air has almost infinite use value whereas an old family photo has almost zero. But from a communistic perspective, a generalization could be made by a naturalistic argument to keep this subjectivity out of the picture. Luckily, since it's already free (of exchange value), this shouldn't necessarily result in oppression.

Though I can see a problem with regards to the non-scarcity rhetoric because of the vagueness in definition of value. If no exchange takes place, how do you know value? This may result in the calamity of defining respective use values.

Who defines "use value"?

True in general.

Value can't be known until there is an established exchange value (even this is unclear with RBE). Transformation of exchange value to prices is a problem that can't be solved into everyone's satisfaction, so there is another hidden subjectivity there. Cost is indirectly related to exchange value among other things, and is an integral part of the transformation problem. Use value, which you missed, is totally free of all this.

how is this at all like a tribe? it's a loose association of strangers that really don't know anything about each other or care about each other or depend on each other, and are only tangentially associated in one small aspect of their lives

How so?

credibility lost

Does the fact that you could get a thousand different answers for this question give you a clue?

Value is subjective and the price and cost comes from that; which tend to vary enormously depending on location, time and other variables.

I'm dependent on it  
And in itself it isn't a bad thing from a primitvist perspective, it's just the way it's used. And in current society internet forums are the closest thing society has to offer to tribes.
I don't really use it for much else.

price and value are separate things
cost is ill-defined but can influence price if you're using it the way I am

So, back to my hypothetical "alien human race" example, the RBE will automatically switch to not being successful the moment we discover there is another portion of humanity (or let's say other intellectual beings) that doesn't abide by the fundamentals of RBE.

I can understand that we share the planet and the resources are too liquid for us to imagine a perfect man-made bubble.

But I don't get how we would resolve this. Maybe I'm missing something and I'm willing to be corrected, so I'll give a dumb example.

Let's say I have a matter very urgent to me half way across the world, that I can't prove that it's urgent. Not in the proper time frame anyway, or a matter that is not mentioned in the rule books.

I meet Bob at the airport waiting for his flight and propose to switch flights. He doesn't agree even though he is ultimately altruistic because his matter is provably urgent. I propose to give him the right to switch flights with me in the future and he accepts.

Are this types of contracts agreeable in a RBE world?

Now, the next week, Bob is in the same situation and manages to get the flight by trading the contract with Alice. Alice, wary of being in the same situation with me and Bob, decides to accumulate these contracts with hopes to trade them in the future. Flight switching contracts becomes a currency.

If this is all agreeable, I will continue this line of thought to reach a point where we can call money exists.

I don't have ulterior motives with this, just want to know what the perspective of Zeitgeist and RBE people are. I would say I'd desire a RBE, but I won't call it possible unless I can plausibly claim that it is. If I can't do that, it's not even a hypothesis.


This would be a more mature conversation if we all decided to speak with the relevant terms from das Kapital, don't you think? At least my dumb questions wouldn't feel that dumb in that context.

Would you agree that price, cost and value are entirely separate things?